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GAME

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE PROJECT

HOW THE UHITED STATES HELPED
UHLEASH FUHDAMEHTALIST ISLAM

ROBERT DREYFUSS

$27.50
$37.95/Canada

THE FIRST COMPLETE INVESTIGATION
OF AMERICA'S MOST DANGEROUS
FOREIGN POLICY MISCALCULATION:
SIXTY YEARS OF SUPPORT FOR
ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM

Devil’s Game is the previously untold
account of America’s misguided efforts,
stretching across six decades, to cultivate
the Islamic right in an effort to dominate the
economically and strategically vital Middle
East. Drawing on archival research and inter¬
views with policy makers and CIA, defense,
and foreign-service officials, Robert Dreyfuss
argues that America’s historic alliance with
the Islamic right is greatly to blame for the
emergence of Islamist terrorism in the 1990s.

Among the hidden stories of U.S. collu¬
sion with radical Islam that Dreyfuss reveals
here are President Eisenhower’s 1953 Oval
Office meeting with a leader of the Muslim
Brotherhood, and the United States’ later
secret alliance with that group and their
Saudi patrons against Egypt's President
Nasser. Dreyfuss meticulously documents the
CIA's funding of the Iranian ayatollahs in the
coup d’etat that restored Iran’s shah to
power, the United States’ support for Saudi
Arabia’s efforts to create a worldwide Islamic
bloc as an antidote to Arab nationalism, and
the longstanding ties between Islamic funda¬
mentalists and the leading banks of the
West. With clarity and rigor, Dreyfuss also
chronicles how the United States looked the
other way when Israel’s secret service sup¬
ported the creation of the radical Palestinian
group Hamas and how a secretive clique of
American strategists in the 1970s exploited

(Continued on back flap)
1105

(Continued from front flap)

political Islam to conduct a proxy war against
the Soviet Union in Afghanistan—leading
directly to the rise of the Taliban.

Wide-ranging and deeply informed, Devil's
Game reveals a history of double-dealing and
cynical exploitation that continues to this
day—as in Iraq, where the United States is
backing radical Islamists, allied with Iran’s
clerics, who have surfaced as the dominant
force in the post-Saddam Hussein Iraqi gov¬
ernment. What emerges is a pattern that, far
from furthering either democracy or security,
ensures a future of blunders and blowback.

Robert Dreyfuss, who covers national secu¬
rity for Rolling Stone, has written extensively on
Iraq and the war on terrorism for The Nation, The
American Prospect, and Mother Jones. A fre¬
quent contributor to NPR, MSNBC, CNBC, and
many other broadcast outlets, he lives in Alexan¬
dria, Virginia.

Jacket design by Raquel Jaramillo

www.henryholt.com

www.americanempireproject.com

Metropolitan Books

Henry Holt and Company

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, New York 10010

Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.
Printed in U.S.A.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

“Robert Dreyfuss has taken us—all of us—behind the trauma of 9/11 and shown
that George Bush’s failure to understand the dynamics of Islamic fundamentalism is
nothing new. Our presidents have been missing the point for decades and, by doing
so, have become the best allies of our worst nightmare. I would have entitled this bril
liant book Dumb and Dumber.”

—Seymour Hersh, author of Chain of Command

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend’ is usually considered unsophisticated, tribal
thinking. But Robert Dreyfuss shows how, during the Cold War, precisely this principle
led the United States to support anti-Communist Islamist movements throughout the
Muslim world—nurturing the whirlwind we are reaping today. His book is judicious,
fascinating, and deeply grounded in a little-known history that stretches many
decades back from the CIA’s support for anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan. He is wise
enough to know that all the strength of fundamentalist Islam can't be blamed on
American bungling, but the amount that can is appalling.”

—Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains and King
Leopold's Ghost

“A fluent tour de force—Dreyfuss skillfully documents the misguided stratagems of
generations of statesmen whose attempts to use the Islamic right to Western strate
gic advantage have helped make political Islam the formidable force it is today. He
makes a convincing case that the U.S. government inadvertently played a central role
in building up the forces that struck New York and Washington on 9/11, and questions
whether some current U.S. policies and actions are not still strengthening rather than
weakening enemies of our country. Dreyfuss's carefully researched and well-written story will
be a revelation to experts on the Islamic world and a shock to concerned Americans."

—Chas W. Freeman, Jr., former assistant secretary of defense and
U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, 1989-92

“Reagan’s CIA director William Casey knew next to nothing about Islamic fundamen
talism or the grievances of Middle Eastern nations against Western imperialism. He
saw political Islam as a natural ally In the American campaign against ‘atheistic’
Communism. The costs to Americans of such misguided, secret machinations
include the 9/11 attacks. Robert Dreyfuss’s history is eye-opening, original, and
important."

—Chalmers Johnson, author of The Sorrows of Empire and Blowback

ISBN 0-8050-7652-2

CURRENT AFFAIRS

Devil’s Game

devil’s Game

HOW THE UNITED STATES
HELPED UNLEASH
FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAM

ROBERT DREYFUSS

Metropolitan Books

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY ■ NEW YORK

Metropolitan Books
Henry Holt and Company, LLC
Publishers since 1866
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10010
www.henryholt.com

Metropolitan Books • and El® are registered
trademarks of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dreyfuss, Robert.

Devil’s game : how the United States helped unleash fundamentalist Islam /
Robert Dreyfuss.—1st ed.

p. cm.—(American empire project)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN- 10 : 0 - 8050 - 7652-2
ISBN- 13 : 978 - 0 - 8050 - 7652-3

1. Islamic countries—Relations—United States. 2. United States—Relations—
Islamic countries. 3. Islamic fundamentalism—Political aspects. I. Title. II. Series.

DS35.74.U6D76 2005

327.73 056'09'045—dc22 2005043881

Henry Holt books are available for special promotions
and premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets.

First Edition 2005
Designed by Victoria Hartman
Printed in the United States of America

3 5 7 9

864

For Anna and Justin

Contents

Introduction i

1 .

Imperial Pan-Islam

England’s Brothers

Islam Meets the Cold War

The War against Nasser and Mossadegh

The King of All Islam

120

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

147

The Rise of Economic Islam

168

Israel’s Islamists

190

Hell’s Ayatollah

214

10.

Jihad I: The “Arc of Islam”

244

11.

Jihad II: Into Central Asia

270

12.

Clash of Civilizations?

303

Notes

343

Acknowledgments

369

Index

37 i

INTRODUCTION

There is an unwritten chapter in the history of the Cold War and
the New World Order that followed. It is the story of how the United
States—sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly—funded and encour¬
aged right-wing Islamist activism. Devil’s Game attempts to fill in that
vital missing link.

Vital because this little-known policy, conducted over six decades,
is partly to blame for the emergence of Islamist terrorism as a world¬
wide phenomenon. Indeed, America’s would-be empire in the Middle
East, North Africa, and Central and South Asia was designed to rest
in part on the bedrock of political Islam. At least that is what its archi¬
tects hoped. But it proved to be a devil’s game. Only too late, after
September n, 2001, did Washington begin to discover its strategic
miscalculation.

The United States spent decades cultivating Islamists, manipulating
and double-crossing them, cynically using and misusing them as Cold
War allies, only to find that it spawned a force that turned against its
sponsor, and with a vengeance. Like monsters imbued with artificial
life, radical imams, mullahs, and ayatollahs stalk the landscape,
thundering not only against the United States but against freedom of

• Devil’s Game

thought, against secular science, against nationalism and the left,
against women’s rights. Some are terrorists, but far more are just
medieval-minded religious fanatics who want to turn the calendar
back to the seventh century.

During the Cold War, from 1945 to 1991, the enemy was not
merely the USSR. According to the Manichean rules of that era, the
United States demonized leaders who did not wholeheartedly sign on
to the American agenda or who might challenge Western and in par¬
ticular U.S. hegemony. Ideas and ideologies that could inspire such
leaders were suspect: nationalism, humanism, secularism, socialism.
But subversive ideas such as these were also the ones most feared by
the nascent forces of Muslim fundamentalism. Throughout the region
the Islamic right fought pitched battles against the bearers of these
notions, not only in the realm of intellectual life but in the streets.
During the decades-long struggle against Arab nationalism—along
with Persian, Turkish, and Indian nationalism—the United States
found it politic to make common cause with the Islamic right.

More broadly, the United States spent many years trying to con¬
struct a barrier against the Soviet Union along its southern flank. The
fact that all of the nations between Greece and China were Muslim
gave rise to the notion that Islam itself might reinforce that Maginot
Line-style strategy. Gradually the idea of a green belt along the “arc
of Islam” took form. The idea was not just defensive. Adventurous
policy makers imagined that restive Muslims inside the Soviet Union’s
own Central Asian republics might be the undoing of the USSR itself,
and they took steps to encourage them.

The United States played not with Islam—that is, the religion, the
traditional, organized system of belief of hundreds of millions—but
with Islamism. Unlike the faith, with fourteen centuries of history
behind it, Islamism is of more recent vintage. It is a political creed with
its origins in the late nineteenth century, a militant, all-encompassing
philosophy whose tenets would appear foreign or heretical to most
Muslims of earlier ages and that still appear so to many educated
Muslims today. Whether it is called pan-Islam, or Islamic fundamen¬
talism, or political Islam, it is an altogether different creature from the
spiritual interpretation of Muslim life as contained in the Five Pillars

Introduction • 3

of Islam. It is, in fact, a perversion of that religious faith. That is the
mutant ideology that the United States encouraged, supported, orga¬
nized, or funded. It is the same one variously represented by the Mus¬
lim Brotherhood, by Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, by Saudi Arabia’s
ultra-orthodox Wahhabism, by Hamas and Hezbollah, by the Afghan
jihadis, and by Osama bin Laden.

The United States found political Islam to be a convenient partner
during each stage of America’s empire-building project in the Middle
East, from its early entry into the region to its gradual military
encroachment, to its expansion into an on-the-ground military pres¬
ence, and finally to the emergence of the United States as an army of
occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the 1950s, the enemy was not only Moscow but the Third
World’s emerging nationalists, from Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt to
Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. The United States and Britain used
the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist movement and the grandfather
organization of the Islamic right, against Nasser, the up-and-coming
leader of the Arab nationalists. In the CIA-sponsored coup d’etat in
Iran in 1953, the United States secretly funded an ayatollah who had
founded the Devotees of Islam, a fanatical Iranian ally of the Muslim
Brotherhood. Later in the same decade, the United States began to toy
with the notion of an Islamic bloc led by Saudi Arabia as a counter¬
point to the nationalist left.

In the 1960s, despite U.S. efforts to contain it, left-wing national¬
ism and Arab socialism spread from Egypt to Algeria to Syria, Iraq,
and Palestine. To counter this seeming threat, the United States forged
a working alliance with Saudi Arabia, intent on using its foreign-
policy arm, Wahhabi fundamentalism. The United States joined with
King Saud and Prince Faisal (later. King Faisal) in pursuit of an
Islamic bloc from North Africa to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Saudi
Arabia founded institutions to mobilize the Wahhabi religious right
and the Muslim Brotherhood. Saudi-backed activists founded the
Islamic Center of Geneva (1961), the Muslim World League (1962),

4 ■ D e

l ’ s Game

the Organization of the Islamic Conference (1969), and other organi¬
zations that formed the core of an international Islamist movement.

In the 1970s, with the death of Nasser and the retreat of Arab
nationalism, the Islamists became an important prop beneath many of
the regimes tied to the United States. The United States found itself
allied with the Islamic right in Egypt, where Anwar Sadat used that
country’s Islamists to build an anti-Nasserist political base; in Paki¬
stan, where General Zia ul-Haq seized power by force and established
an Islamist state; and in Sudan, where the Muslim Brotherhood’s
leader, Hassan Turabi, marched toward power. At the same time, the
United States began to see Islamic fundamentalism as a tool to be used
offensively against the Soviet Union, above all in Afghanistan and
Central Asia, where the United States used it as sword aimed at the
Soviet Union’s underbelly. And as Iran’s revolution unfolded, latent
sympathy for Islamism—combined with widespread U.S. ignorance
about Iran’s Islamist currents—led many U.S. officials to see Ayatollah
Khomeini as a benign figure, admiring his credentials as an anti¬
communist. As a result, the United States catastrophically underesti¬
mated his movement’s potential in Iran.

Even after the Iranian revolution of 1979, the United States and its
allies failed to learn the lesson that Islamism was a dangerous, uncon¬
trollable force. The United States spent billions of dollars to support
an Islamist jihad in Afghanistan, whose mujahideen were led by Mus¬
lim Brotherhood-allied groups. The United States also looked on
uncritically as Israel and Jordan covertly aided terrorists from the
Muslim Brotherhood in a civil war in Syria, and as Israel encouraged
the spread of Islamism among Palestinians in the occupied territories,
helping to found Hamas. And neoconservatives joined the CIA’s Bill
Casey in the 1980s in secret deals with Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini.

By the 1990s, the Cold War was over. The political utility of the
Islamic right now seemed questionable. Some strategists argued that
political Islam was a new threat, the new “ism” replacing communism
as America’s global opponent. That, however, wildly exaggerated the
power of a movement that was restricted to poor, undeveloped states.
Still, from Morocco to Indonesia, political Islam was a force that the
United States had to deal with. Washington’s response was muddled

Introduction • 5

and confused. During the 1990s, the United States faced a series of
crises with political Islam: In Algeria, the United States sympathized
with the rising forces of political Islam, only to support the Algerian
army’s crackdown against them—and then Washington kept open a
dialogue with the Algerian Islamists, who increasingly turned to ter¬
rorism. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots, includ¬
ing a violent underground movement, posed a dire threat to President
Mubarak’s regime; yet the United States toyed with supporting the
Brothers. And in Afghanistan, shattered after the decade-long U.S.
jihad, the Taliban won early American support. Even as Osama bin
Laden’s A 1 Qaeda took shape, the United States found itself in league
with the Islamic right in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Gulf.

And then came 9/11.

After 2001, the Bush administration appeared to sign on to the
neoconservative declaration that the world was defined by a “clash of
civilizations,” and launched its global war on terrorism, targeting A 1
Qaeda—the most virulent strain of the very virus that the United States
had helped create. Still, before, during, and after the invasion of
Iraq—a socialist, secular country that had long opposed Islamic
fundamentalism—the United States actively supported Iraq’s Islamic
right, overtly backing Iraqi Shiite Islamists, from Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani
to radical Islamist parties such as the Supreme Council for Islamic Rev¬
olution in Iraq and the Islamic Call (Al-Dawa), both of which are also
supported by Teheran’s mullahs.

Ill

The vaunted clash of civilizations, that tectonic collision between the
West and the Islamic world, if that’s what it was, began inauspi-
ciously. Amid the wreckage of World War II, America stumbled willy-
nilly into the Middle East, into a world it knew little about. If the
United States made mistakes in dealing with Islam in the second half
of the twentieth century, it was in part because Americans were so
profoundly ignorant about it.

Until 1941 the Middle East, for young America, was a fearsome
and wonderful place, a fantasyland of sheikhs and harems, of turbaned

6 ■ Devil’s Game

sultans, of obscene bath houses and seraglios, of desert oases, pyramids,
and the Holy Land. In early literature—novels, poems, travelogues—it
was a place of mystery and intrigue, inhabited by the unsavory and the
irreligious. Its people were often portrayed as scimitar-waving “Mussul-
men” and “Mohammedans,” uncivilized and uncouth. It was the land
of pirates and “Turks,” a term that retains its pejorative connotation
today.

Since its appearance in 1869, Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad
has come to symbolize a peculiarly American sort of naive blundering
overseas. Yet few realize that Twain, perhaps America’s most acute
satirist and observer, used the book to describe a months-long sojourn
in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. It was hugely influential
among nineteenth-century U.S. readers. But Twain unfortunately con¬
tributed to, and took advantage of, built-in prejudice against things
Islamic. Meandering through Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine,
Twain seems to be fairly holding his nose, marveling at the barbarism
he is surveying. Dwellings are “tastefully frescoed aloft and alow with
disks of camel dung placed there to dry.” Damascus (“How they hate
a Christian in Damascus!”) is the “most fanatical Mohammedan pur¬
gatory out of Arabia.” He added: “The Damascenes are the ugliest,
wickedest looking villains we have seen.” Comparing the Holy Land
to a classical engraving of Nazareth, Twain wrote:

But in the engraving there was no desolation; no dirt; no rags; no
fleas; no ugly features; no sore eyes; no feasting flies; no besotted
ignorance in the countenances; no raw places on the donkey’s
backs; no disagreeable jabbering in unknown tongues; no stench
of camels; no suggestion that a couple of tons of powder placed
under the party and touched off would heighten the effect and give
to the scene a genuine interest and charm which it would always
be pleasant to recall.

By the early twentieth century—with the advent of World War I,
the forced disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, and the start of the
British-sponsored “Arab Awakening,” led by the likes of Winston
Churchill, T. E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”), and Gertrude Bell—the mod-

Introduction • 7

ern Middle East had begun to intrude on the American consciousness.
Still, it was filtered through a layer of romanticism and ignorance.
Lawrence’s sexually charged, desert-romantic accounts, including his
famous Seven Pillars of Wisdom, became U.S. bestsellers, as did oasis-
to-oasis travelogues by various adventurers. For most Americans, the
Middle East was most memorably encapsulated in film and song.
Rudolf Valentino’s The Sheik (1921) embodied what would become
the standard-issue American idea of the Arab, along with its accom¬
panying 1921 song, “The Sheik of Araby,” whose lyrics included the
vaguely threatening: “At night, when you’re asleep / Into your tent I’ll
creep.” Its influence lasted decades. Benny Goodman recorded the
song in 1937, as did the Beatles in 1962 and Leon Redbone in 1977.

Little if any professional American Middle East expertise existed in
the years leading up to World War II. From the nineteenth century
until well into the twentieth, pretty much the only Americans who ven¬
tured into the region were members of a band of Protestant missionar¬
ies, educators, and doctors who took it upon themselves to bring the
gospels to the heathen masses and to preach among the Christians of
the Ottoman Empire, in Syria and Lebanon especially. Pioneers such as
Daniel Bliss, his son Howard Bliss, and the Dodge brothers (Reverend
David Stuart Dodge and William Early Dodge), who built and ran Syr¬
ian Protestant College—renamed the American University of Beirut in
the 1920s—and Mary Eddy, a missionary’s daughter who founded a
clinic in Lebanon, alighted on the shores of the Ottoman Empire’s
Arab provinces. The Blisses, Dodges, and Eddys would become the
parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of America’s priest¬
hood of “Arabists” who emerged after World War II.

In 1945 Franklin Delano Roosevelt went east in search of oil—and
found Islam. He conducted a fateful shipboard encounter with the
king of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud, and for the United States, it marked
the real start of its political and military engagement with the region.
Flushed with victory, the United States found itself in the role of a

8 • Devil’s Game

worldwide superpower. Its activism then was naive in the extreme—
endearingly so for its partisans, and frighteningly so for others. The
post-World War II generation of U.S. leaders believed wholeheartedly
that the American spirit would conquer all, figuratively speaking—or,
if necessary, on the ground in real life. This was, after all, Henry
Luce’s “American Century.”

The Middle East was then emerging as the most strategically vital
area outside the industrial West and Japan. Though it lacked exper¬
tise, language skills, and cultural familiarity with the region’s complex
civilization, the United States was called to its imperial mission by the
very logic of its immense power. In Norman Mailer’s The Naked and
the Dead, General Cummings presciently described the inexorable
growth of American power that would be unleashed by World War II:

I like to call it a process of historical energy [says Cummings].
There are countries that have latent powers, latent resources, they
are full of potential energy, so to speak. ... As kinetic energy a
country is organization, coordinated effort.... Historically, the
purpose of this war is to translate America’s potential energy into
kinetic energy... . When you’ve created power, materials, armies,
they don’t wither of their own accord. Our vacuum as a nation is
filled with released power, and I can tell you that we’re out of the
backwaters of history now.

But as America’s energy flowed into the Islamic world, the United
States began its long-running engagement with little or no compre¬
hension of the forces it was dealing with.

Until after the Second World War, Middle East studies in the
United States were virtually nonexistent or relegated to a subset of
theology. Partly sponsored by the government, centers for Middle
Eastern affairs began springing up after 1947, when Princeton Uni¬
versity created the first Near East center in the United States. But it
would be many years before the United States would have a cadre of
academic experts who had a grasp of Islamic politics, culture, and
religion.

From FDR on, leading U.S. politicians were prisoners of mis¬
guided stereotypes. They seemed entranced by the almost other-

Introduction • 9

worldly appearance of their Arab interlocutors. FDR, after meeting
Ibn Saud, returned to Washington and “could not shake the image of
the hawk-like Saudi monarch, ensconced in a gold chair and sur¬
rounded by six slaves.” Harry Truman, two years later, described a
leading Saudi official as a “real old biblical Arab with chin whiskers, a
white gown, gold braid, and everything.” And Eisenhower dismissed
the Arabs as “a very uncertain quantity, explosive and full of preju¬
dices.” The official record is full of such uninformed stereotyping of
Arabs and Muslims by U.S. officials. For the next sixty years, the
handful of American Arabists who actually knew something about
the Middle East would try to combat those stereotypes. But they
would fail.

The American attachment to a romanticized fantasy of Arab life and a
racist-fed, religious disdain for the Arabs’ supposed heathenism
proved a deadly combination when the time came for America to
engage itself politically and militarily in the Middle East. Perhaps
those stereotypes led American policy makers to see Muslims as fierce
warriors. Perhaps they believed that the fanaticism of their religious
tenets would lead them to resist atheistic communism. Perhaps it was
the notion that in southwest Asia the traditional religious establish¬
ment was a bulwark of the status quo. But it never dawned on U.S.
officials that Islamist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood
were a qualitatively different phenomenon from the comprador cleri¬
cal establishment. Certainly, as the Cold War progressed, the big
enemy, the USSR, and its alleged accomplice, Arab nationalism,
seemed to have a common enemy: Islam.

In some ways, the Cold War itself began in the Middle East. Presi¬
dent Harry Truman proclaimed U.S. responsibility for Greece and
Turkey, replacing Great Britain in that role, in 1947, and confronted
the Soviet Union in northern Iran’s Azerbaijan. England’s imperial
presence was shrinking: London abandoned Greece and Turkey, then
India and Palestine, and the retreat was on—with only the United

[o • Devil’s Game

States to fill the vacuum, an allegedly tempting target for Soviet
expansion. (Later scholarship would show that neither Stalin nor
Khrushchev had either the intention or the capability to seize control
of the Persian Gulf and the Middle East.)

The strategic importance of the Middle East was obvious to all: it
was (and is) the indispensable source of energy for America’s allies in
Europe and Japan. At the time, the United States did not depend on
the Persian Gulf for oil, relying instead on Venezuela and Texas,
Louisiana, and Oklahoma. But Europe and Japan desperately needed
the Gulf for day-to-day survival. It is no exaggeration to say that U.S.
strategists realized that the defense of Western Europe was inconceiv¬
able without a parallel plan to control the Gulf. Despite important
internal tensions among the Western powers, they forged a series of
alliances in the region: NATO, the abortive Middle East Defense
Organization, the Baghdad Pact, CENTO—all directed against the
USSR. More quietly Washington and London supported the Islamic
right against the left in country after country and encouraged the
emergence of an “Islamic bloc.”

For those who knew little about the religion and culture of the
Middle East—presidents, secretaries of state, CIA directors—the
Islamic right seemed like a sensible horse to ride. They could identify
with people inspired by deep religious belief, even if the religion was
an alien one. In their search for tactical allies, Islam seemed like a bet¬
ter bet than secularism, since the left-wing secularists were viewed as
cats’-paws for Moscow, and the centrist ones were dangerously
opposed to the region’s monarchies and traditional elites. In the after-
math of World War II, the list of nations ruled by kings included not
only Saudi Arabia and Jordan, but Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Libya.

By the 1950s, the military-intellectual complex of Middle East
studies was up and running in many U.S. universities, producing
Arabists and Orientalists who were called on by policy makers for
advice in grappling with the region’s complexities. The CIA and the
State Department gobbled up Ivy League graduates who spoke Ara¬
bic, Turkish, Farsi, Urdu, and other Middle East languages, and a
core of U.S. government Arabists emerged with at least a working
understanding of the region. Yet, by their own testimony, few of them

Introduction • i

learned much about Islam or Islamism, concentrating instead on the
nuts-and-bolts economic and political questions. Most of the Arabists
were secularists, and did not have much sympathy for fundamentalist
Islam. Many, in fact, instead sympathized broadly with Arab nation¬
alism. Many of them saw Islam as the bygone symbol of a past era.

As the Cold War unfolded, however, State Department and CIA
officers who sided with Arab nationalism were increasingly ignored.
Their views were attacked by Cold Warriors, and by the supporters of
Israel, who were determined to undermine anyone who considered
himself or herself “pro-Arab.” By the 1970s, the very term Arabist
had become indelibly tainted. Since then, pro-Zionist activists have
piled on, waging an ideological blitzkrieg against those Arabists who
remained in government or academia. Robert D. Kaplan’s tenden¬
tious 1993 book. The Arabists: Romance of an American Elite,
marked the high point of this effort. Ever since its publication, attack¬
ing Arabists has become a cottage industry. Virtually all of them were
excluded from prewar planning on Iraq. To a man, most Arabists
were strongly opposed to the preemptive war. But by excluding them,
the Bush administration guaranteed that planning for the war would
be carried out by know-nothings.

Some may argue that the United States created neither Islam nor its
fundamentalist variant, and that is true. But here we need to consider
an extended analogy with America’s Christian right.

Conservative and evangelistic Christians have been present in
large numbers in America since the colonial era. But in another sense,
the emergence of the Christian right in the United States can be dated
to the late 1970s, with the formation of the Rev. Timothy LaHaye’s
California alliance of churches, the creation of the Moral Majority by
LaHaye and Jerry Falwell, and the role of those two men and others
in the rise of the Council on National Policy, the Christian Coalition,
and organizations like Pat Robertson’s broadcast empire and Dr.
James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. Until then, conservative Chris¬
tians were a politically inchoate force. Relentlessly organized over the

iz • Devil’s Game

past three decades, they have become a self-conscious, politically
powerful movement.

The same is true for the Islamic right. The reactionary tendency
within Islam goes back thirteen centuries. From Islam’s earliest years,
obscurantists, anti-rationalists, and Koran literalists competed with
more enlightened, progressive, and moderate tendencies. In more
recent times, Muslim reactionaries have been a drag on moderniza¬
tion, opposing progressive education, liberalization, and human rights.
But it wasn’t until the creation of the pan-Islamic movement of Jamal
Eddine al-Afghani in the late 1800s, the founding of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, and the creation
of Abul-Ala Mawdudi’s Islamic Group in Pakistan in 1940 that the
Islamic right had its LaHayes, its Falwells, and its Robertsons. Those
early Islamists sharpened the culture wars in the Middle East just as
their Christian right counterparts did in the United States, and for the
same reasons.

Just as the Christian right found support from wealthy right-wing
donors, especially oil men from Texas and the Midwest, the Islamic
right won financial support from wealthy oil men, too—namely, the
royal families atop Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. And just as the Chris¬
tian right formed a politically convenient alliance with right-wing
Republicans, the Islamic right established a similar understanding
with America’s right-wing foreign policy strategists. In fact, support
for the Christian right and the Islamic right converged neatly during
the Reagan administration, which eagerly sought alliances with both. So
blinded were some Americans by the Cold War that militant Christian-
right activists and fervent Zionist partisans of Israel cheerily supported
Islamist fanatics in Afghanistan.

The analogy between Christian and Islamic fundamentalists holds
in other areas, too. Both exhibit an absolute certainty about their
beliefs and they tolerate no dissent, condemning apostates, unbelievers,
and freethinkers to perdition. Both believe in a unity of religion and
politics, the former insisting that America is a “Christian nation,” the
latter that Muslims need to be ruled either by an all-powerful, religio-
political caliphate or by a system of “Islamic republics” under an
ultra-orthodox version of Islamic law (sharia). And both encourage a

Introduction • 13

blind fanaticism among their followers. It’s no accident that among
followers of both Christian and Islamic fundamentalism, the world
indeed appears to be engaged in a clash of civilizations.

VII

A war on terrorism is precisely the wrong way to deal with the chal¬
lenge posed by political Islam.

That challenge comes in two forms. First, there is the specific
threat to the safety and security of Americans posed by A 1 Qaeda; and
second, there is a far broader political problem created by the growth
of the Islamic right in the Middle East and South Asia.

In regard to A 1 Qaeda, the Bush administration has willfully exag¬
gerated the size of the threat it represents. It is not an all-powerful
organization. It cannot destroy or conquer America, and it does not
pose an existential threat to the United States. It can kill Americans,
but it has never had access to weapons of mass destruction, and it
almost certainly never will. It does not possess large numbers of cells,
assets, or agents inside the United States, although after 9/11 the U.S.
attorney general made the unfounded charge that A 1 Qaeda had as
many as 5,000 operatives in America. None of the many hundreds of
Muslims arrested or detained after 9/11 were found to have terrorist
connections. In three and a half years after 9/11, not a single violent
act by A 1 Qaeda—or any other Islamic terrorist group—occurred in
the United States: no hijackings, no bombings, not even a shot fired.
No ties were ever proved linking Al Qaeda to Iraq—or to any other
state in the Muslim world: not to Syria, not to Saudi Arabia, not to
Iran. In short, the threat from Al Qaeda is a manageable one.

Using the U.S. military in conventional war mode is not the way to
attack Al Qaeda, which is primarily a problem for intelligence and
law enforcement. The war in Afghanistan was wrongheaded: It failed
to destroy Al Qaeda’s leadership, it failed to destroy the Taliban,
which scattered, and it failed to stabilize that war-torn nation more
than temporarily, creating a weak central government at the mercy of
warlords and former Taliban gangs. Worse, the war in Iraq was not
only misguided and unnecessary, but it was aimed at a nation that had

4 * Devil’s Game

absolutely no links to bin Laden’s gang—as if, said an observer, FDR
had attacked Mexico in response to Pearl Harbor. The ham-handed
use of the armed forces against a nonstate actor like Al Qaeda is use¬
less and self-defeating. Like some grotesque ancient legend, for every
head lopped off by laser-guided missiles. Marine-led raids into Islamist
redoubts, Israeli gunship attacks on Hamas and Hezbollah enclaves,
and cruise missile attacks on remote strongholds, three new heads
grow in its place. But because the Afghan and Iraq wars fit nicely with
the Bush administration’s broader policy of empire building and pre¬
emptive war, and because they allowed the United States to construct
a vast political-military enterprise stretching from East Africa deep
into Central Asia, those two wars went forward. A problem that
could have been dealt with surgically—using commandos and Special
Forces, aided by tough-minded diplomacy, indictments and legal action,
concerted international efforts, and judicious self-defense measures—
was vastly inflated by the Bush administration.

Still, Al Qaeda can be defeated.

The larger problem, that of the growing strength of Islamic funda¬
mentalism in the Middle East and Asia, is far more complicated.

Naturally, the first problem is related to the second. Unless the
Islamic right is stopped, it is possible that Al Qaeda could resuscitate
itself. Or, as in Iraq after the U.S. invasion, new Al Qaeda-style orga¬
nizations might emerge by drawing on anti-American anger and
resentment. Or, one of the other Islamic-right terrorist groups, such as
Hamas or Hezbollah, might metastasize from a group with a mostly
local focus to one with larger, international ambitions. The violence-
prone and terrorism-inclined groups in the Middle East draw finan¬
cial support, theological justification, and legions of recruits from
among the more established Islamic fundamentalist institutions that
have sprung up in the past three decades in virtually every Muslim
country. Like a kettle of water boiling on a stove, out of which only a
small volume of steam steadily escapes into the air, in the Middle East
the forces associated with political Islam are kept simmering. Out of
it, a steady stream of radicals is constantly emitted—extremists who
are immediately absorbed by one of the already existing terrorist

groups.

Introduction • 15

So what can the United States do to turn down the heat? To lower
the political temperature underneath the Islamist movement?

First, the United States must do what it can to remove the griev¬
ances that cause angry Muslims to seek solace in organizations like
the Muslim Brotherhood. Not all of these grievances, of course, are
caused by the United States, and not all of them can be softened or
ameliorated by U.S. actions. At the very least, however, the United
States can take important steps that can weaken the ability of the
Islamic right to harvest recruits. By joining with the UN, the Euro¬
peans, and Russia, the United States can help settle the Palestinian-
Israeli conflict in a manner that guarantees justice for the Palestinians:
an independent state that is geographically and economically viable,
tied to the withdrawal of illegal Israeli settlements, an Israeli return
roughly to its 1967 borders, and a stable and equitable division of
Jerusalem. That, more than any other action, would remove a global
casus belli for the Islamic right.

Second, the United States must abandon its imperial pretensions in
the Middle East. That will require the withdrawal of U.S. forces from
Afghanistan and Iraq, the dismantling of U.S. military bases in the
Persian Gulf and facilities in Saudi Arabia, and a sharp reduction in
the visibility of the U.S. Navy, military training missions, and arms
sales. Many U.S. diplomats who have worked in the region know that
the provocative U.S. presence in the Middle East fuels anger and
resentment. The United States has no claim to either the Persian Gulf
or the Middle East, whose future economic ties and political relation¬
ships can and must be determined solely by the leaders of the region’s
states, even if it redounds to the detriment of U.S. interests.

Third, the United States must refrain from seeking to impose its
preferences on the region. Since 2001, the United States has done
incalculable damage by demanding that the “greater Middle East”
conform to American visions of democracy. To be sure, for the more
radical idealists in the Bush administration. Bush’s call for democracy
in the Arab world and Iran is seen primarily as a pretext for more
intrusive U.S. involvement in the region. Even taken at face value,
however, the initiative ignores the fact that the nations of the Middle
East must find democracy at their own pace and in their own time. An

6 • Devil’s Game

obsessive drive for democratic reform in the region is self-defeating
and insulting to the states and peoples of the Middle East. Some of
those states may be ready for reform, and some may not. Democratic
changes that end up empowering the Islamic right and catapulting the
Muslim Brotherhood to power in Cairo, Damascus, Riyadh, or
Algiers will not serve their intended purpose. They will only deliver
additional states into the hands of the Islamists. The United States
should adopt a hands-off policy in connection with democracy in the
Islamic world.

And fourth, the United States must abandon its propensity to
make bellicose threats directed at nations in the Middle East, includ¬
ing those—such as Iran and Sudan—that are still under Islamist rule.
The wave of Islamism may not yet have crested. Other nations may
succumb to its tide before it recedes, since it is a force that has gath¬
ered momentum for decades. But the United States must get used to
the fact that threats of force and imperial-sounding diktats strengthen
Islamism. They do not diminish it.

The true emancipation of the Middle East will require action by
the secular forces in the region to uplift, educate, and modernize the
outlook of people who have been captured by Islamism. It is an effort
that will take decades, but it must begin now. There is nothing about
Islam that requires it to remain mired in the seventh-century belief
that the Koran must govern the world of politics, education, science,
and culture. It means changing a culture that allows millions of
deluded Muslims to think that back-to-basics fundamentalism is some¬
how an appropriate answer to twenty-first-century problems and con¬
cerns. Fundamentalism, whether it takes the form of Islamism, or
whether it appears in the form of America’s Christian right or Israel’s
ultra-Orthodox settler movement, is always a reactionary force. In
the Muslim world, a rational division of the secular and the divine is
far from unheard of. Tens of millions of Muslims are able to separate
their religious beliefs, held privately, from their politics, just as mil¬
lions of Muslims, Christians, and Jews do in the United States. It is
they—the true silent majority—who must seize the initiative from
the fundamentalists. They may ask for, and should receive, support

Introduction • 17

from civil society in the West: from NGOs and universities, from
research centers and think tanks, and more.

The peoples of the Middle East must engage not only in nation
building but in “religion building.” As the hothouse temperatures in
Middle East political discourse are lowered, Muslim religious schol¬
ars, philosophers, and social scientists can come together in a great
debate to hammer out a twenty-first-century vision of a tolerant,
modern Islam, to create a new culture no longer held hostage by self¬
dealing mullahs and ayatollahs. A consensus can emerge organically
in the Muslim world that reinterprets ancient texts and traditions in a
manner appropriate to an enlightened world outlook, and then that
consensus must find its way into every nook and cranny, beginning in
the major cities—Istanbul, Cairo, Baghdad, Karachi, Jakarta—and
spreading to every village and mosque. It will mean reforming the
educational curriculum in the Muslim world, deemphasizing religious
universities and so-called madrassas in favor of modern education. It
will require new mass-media outlets in places where they can flourish,
and the use of radio, satellite television, and the Internet to reach
places where they cannot. All this will take many years. It cannot
occur unless the armed conflicts that roil the region are ended, and
unless economic conditions move steadily upward. Religion building,
like nation building, can take a long, long time.

IMPERIAL PAN-ISLAM

In 1885, exactly one hundred years before officials of the
Reagan administration made a secret initiative toward Ayatollah
Khomeini’s Iran, a century before the United States spent billions of
dollars in support of an anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan led by Islamic
fundamentalist mujahideen, a peripatetic Persian-Afghan activist met
in London with British intelligence and foreign policy officials to put
forward a controversial idea. Would Britain, he wondered, be inter¬
ested in organizing a pan-Islamic alliance among Egypt, Turkey, Per¬
sia, and Afghanistan against czarist Russia? 1

It was the era of the Great Game, the long-running imperial struggle
between Russia and England for control of Central Asia. The British,
owners of India, had seized control of Egypt in 1881. Turkey’s Otto¬
man Empire—which included, among other lands, what is now Iraq,
Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states—was
wobbly, too, and important pieces of it were up for grabs, although the
final dismantling of Turkey’s holdings would await World War I. The
biggest imperial land ’rush in history was under way in Africa and
southwest Asia. And the British, masters of manipulating tribal, ethnic,
and religious affiliations, expert at setting minorities at one another’s

zo • Devil’s Game

throats for the greater good of Her Majesty’s realm, were intrigued
with the idea of fostering a spirit of Islamic revivalism—if it could serve
their purposes. Both Russia and France had the same idea, but it was
the British, with their tens of millions of Muslim subjects in the greater
Middle East and South Asia, who had the advantage.

The man who, in 1885, proposed the idea of a British-led pan-
Islamic alliance was Jamal Eddine al-Afghani. From the 1870s to the
1890s, Afghani was supported by the United Kingdom, and at least
once, the record shows—in 1882, in India, according to a secret file
of the Indian government’s intelligence service—Afghani officially
offered to go to Egypt as an agent of British intelligence. 2

Afghani, the founder of pan-Islam, is the great-great-grandfather of
Osama bin Laden—not biologically, but in ideological terms. Were we
to construct a biblical genealogy of right-wing Islamism, it would read
like this: Afghani (1838-1897) begat Mohammed Abduh (1849-
1905), an Egyptian pan-Islamic activist who was Afghani’s chief dis¬
ciple and who helped spread Afghani’s message. Abduh begat
Mohammed Rashid Rida (1865-1935), a Syrian disciple of Abduh’s,
who moved to Egypt and founded a magazine, The Lighthouse, to
advocate Abduh’s ideas in support of a system of Islamic republics.
Rashid Rida begat Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949), who learned
Islamism from Rashid Rida’s The Lighthouse, and who founded the
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. Banna begat many offspring.
Among them were his son-in-law, Said Ramadan, the Muslim Brother¬
hood’s international organizer, whose headquarters were in Switzer¬
land, and Abul-Ala Mawdudi, the founder of the Islamic Group in
Pakistan, the first Islamist political party, who was inspired by Banna’s
work. Banna’s other heirs set up branches of the Brotherhood in every
Muslim state, in Europe, and in the United States. Another of Banna’s
offspring, a Saudi who took part in America’s Afghan jihad, was A 1
Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden, the family’s blackest sheep.

In the half century between 1875 and 1925, the building blocks of
the Islamic right were cemented in place by the British empire. Afghani
created the intellectual foundation for a pan-Islamic movement—with
British patronage and the support of England’s leading Orientalist,
E. G. Browne. Abduh, Afghani’s chief disciple, founded, with the help

Imperial Pan-Islam • z i

of London’s Egyptian proconsul, Evelyn Baring Lord Cromer, the
Salafiyya movement, the radical-right, back-to-basics fundamentalist
current that still exists today. To understand the proper role of
Afghani and Abduh, it is important to see them as experiments in a
century-long British effort to organize a pro-British pan-Islamic move¬
ment. Afghani, a quixotic and slippery ally, shopped his services to
other imperial powers, and ultimately his mystical, semi-modernist
version of fundamentalist Islam failed to rise to the level of a mass
movement. Abduh, his chief disciple, attached himself more firmly to
the British rulers of Egypt and created the cornerstone of the Muslim
Brotherhood, which dominated the Islamic right throughout the twen¬
tieth century. The British backed Abduh even as they launched two
other pre-World War I schemes to mobilize Islamic fervor. In the
Arabian Peninsula, the British helped a desert band of ultra¬
fundamentalist Arabs, led by the family of Ibn Saud, create the world’s
first Islamic fundamentalist state in Saudi Arabia. At the same time,
they encouraged the Hashemites of Mecca, a second Arabian family
with a spurious claim to be descended from the original prophet of
Islam, whose sons London installed as kings of Iraq and Jordan.

Originally, the Hashemites, as guardians of the Arabian holy cities
of Mecca and Medina, were supposed to have assumed the leadership
of the entire Muslim world, with the idea of establishing a pro-British
caliphate to replace the faltering one in Turkey. That plan never quite
came together, but a parallel one did. From the 1920s on, the new
Saudi state merged its Wahhabi orthodoxy with the Salafiyya, now
organized into the Muslim Brotherhood—and the resurgence of Islam
was under way.

It was Afghani, however, who started it all. Like many of his prog¬
eny, Afghani made common cause with the imperial powers as they
competed for influence over the vast swath of territory between east
Africa and China. Years after his death, many—but not all—of his
biographers and chroniclers have painted him as a believer, consis¬
tently advocating a renaissance of Islam; as an anti-imperialist, thun¬
dering against the great powers; and as a liberal reformer, seeking to
blend medieval Islam with the scientific rationalism of the Enlighten¬
ment. While elements of all this are present in Afghani’s career, he was

2.2. • Devil’s Game

above all a political magician who invoked religion for temporal ends,
and who was at once ally, errand boy, and tool of the imperial powers.
Although Afghani rarely missed an opportunity to offer his services, in
serial fashion, to the British, to the French, and to the Russians, and
served as an agent for all three, his followers—Abduh especially—
became increasingly Anglophilic.

Born in 1838, apparently in Persia, Jamal Eddine adopted the
name “al-Afghani” in order to create the impression that he was born
in Afghanistan. By claiming Afghan origins, Afghani could disguise
his identity as both a Persian and a Shiite, the minority branch of
Islam, thus giving him a broader appeal in the mostly Sunni Muslim
world. Lying about his place of birth was just Afghani’s first dissimu¬
lation. According to Elie Kedourie, a leading British Orientalist,
Afghani’s followers (including Abduh and Rashid Rida) “practiced
economy of truth.” 3 Throughout his life, Afghani dissembled.
Although he is rightly credited with having developed the theoretical
basis for a pan-Islamic political and social movement spanning the
entire Muslim world, he was a heterodox thinker who was a Free¬
mason, a mystic, a political operative, and, above all, someone who
believed, as Kedourie wrote, in the “social utility of religion.” 4 Afghani
treated religion as a tool. He was outwardly pious, constructing a
detailed scheme for a politics governed by the pared-down, seventh-
century version of the simple Muslim society of Mecca during the era
of the Prophet. But in his more esoteric writing, Afghani was explicit
about his beliefs:

We do not cut the head of religion except with the sword of reli¬
gion. Therefore, if you were to see us now, you would see ascetics
and worshippers, kneeling and genuflecting, never disobeying
God’s commands and doing all that they are ordered to do. 5

Noted Kedourie: “This letter makes absolutely clear that one of
Afghani’s aims—of which his disciple Abduh knew and approved—
was the subversion of the Islamic religion, and that the method
adopted to this end was the practice of a false but showy devotion.” 6

Imperial Pati-Islam • 23

In fact, although he preached Islamic orthodoxy to the masses,
Afghani was a closet atheist who railed against not only Islam, but all
religions, to more esoteric groups of listeners:

Religions [wrote Afghani], whatever they are called, resemble one
another. No understanding and no reconciliation is possible
between these religions and philosophy. Religion imposes its faith
and its creed on man, while philosophy liberates him from them
wholly or in part.

However, Afghani concluded: “[But] reason does not please the mass
and its teachings are understood only by a few choice spirits.” 7 The
elitism of this passage is an essential part of Afghani’s mystique.
Throughout his life, Afghani had one message for the “mass” and
another for the “choice spirits”: for the masses, pan-Islam; for the
elite, an eclectic brand of philosophy. And while he posed as an anti¬
imperialist when it suited his purposes, Afghani and those in his inner
circle engaged in conspiratorial alliance with those very imperialists.

Many historians, however, take the Afghani story at face value:
that as an Islamic activist, he helped to create a movement that would
restore Islam to its former glory, to recapture the pristine, golden days
of the Prophet’s rule in Mecca and Medina. Much conventional wis¬
dom portrays Afghani as a crusader against imperialism, and as a
reformer who sought to bring enlightenment and rationalism to a fog¬
bound Islamic intellectual tradition controlled by a stodgy clergy.
Sadly, that is the view propounded by some of the leading Anglo-
American Orientalists. H. A. R. Gibb, author of the classic Modern-
Trends in Islam (1947), wrote that Afghani believed in a state gov¬
erned by “sound Koranic orthodoxy” 8 mixed with a modernistic out¬
look, while Wilfred Cantwell Smith called Afghani “the complete
Muslim of his time.” In his landmark work, Islam in Modern History,
Smith wrote breathlessly about Afghani’s alleged anti-imperialism:

He [Afghani] saw the West as something primarily to be resisted,
because it threatened Islam and the community.... He was vigor¬
ous in inciting his Muslim hearers to develop reason and technology

24 * D

l ’ s Game

as the West was doing, in order to be strong.. .. Indeed, this urging
to action, from a non-responsible quietude to a self-directing
determination, was carried further into an almost irrepressible or
effervescent dynamism. 9

Smith wrote admiringly of Afghani that

geographically, his career encompassed Iran, India, the Arab
world, and Turkey, as well as the European West. He was both
Sufi and Sunni. He preached a reconciliation with the Shiah. He
united with traditional Islamic scholarship a familiarity with
Europe and an acquaintance with its modern thought. ... He
inspired political revolutionaries and venerable scholars. He advo¬
cated both local nationalisms and pan-Islam. A very great deal of
subsequent Islamic development is adumbrated in his personality
and career. In fact, there is very little in twentieth-century Islam
not foreshadowed in Afghani. 10

Correctly, Smith added that Afghani was “the first Muslim revivalist
to use the concepts ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’ as connoting antagonistic
historical phenomena.” 11 That makes Afghani the true originator of
the concept of a clash of civilizations, as popularized a century later
by Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington.

Whether Afghani was, as Smith maintains, irrepressibly dynamic
or merely opportunistic, there is no question about his role as god¬
father to the Muslim Brotherhood and similar groups on the Islamic
right. The devout and militant Brothers of today would no doubt be
shocked to learn that their inspirational forerunner Jamal Eddine al-
Afghani was an atheist and a Freemason. Nonetheless, Richard R
Mitchell, whose book The Society of the Muslim Brothers is the defin¬
itive work on the organization, observed that the pedigree for the mil¬
itant, terrorist organization that rose to prominence in Egypt after
World War II goes directly back to Afghani. “The Brothers saw them¬
selves clearly in the line of the modern reform movement identified
with the names of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Mohammed Abduh, and
Rashid Rida,” he wrote. “Towards Afghani the Brothers felt a special
kinship. Many felt him to be the ‘spiritual father’ of the movement
and to him Banna was most often compared.” 12

Imperial Pan-Islam • z 5

Afghani and His Followers

Afghani’s public life began in 1869, when he left Afghanistan. Little is
known about his life before that. He claimed to have been involved in
Afghan politics in the 1860s, and according to a leading scholar he
did so while acting as a Russian agent. 13 But his lasting impact began
only in 1869, when he undertook a remarkable, quarter-century-long
odyssey.

Even in brief outline, it is dizzying. He went first to India, whose
British-led colonial authorities welcomed the Islamic scholar with hon¬
ors, graciously escorting him aboard a government-owned vessel on an
all-expenses-paid voyage to Suez. After visiting Cairo, he traveled to
Turkey, where his unorthodox religious views caused a furor among
the religious establishment, leading the Turkish government to expel
him unceremoniously. Back in Cairo, Afghani was adopted by the
Egyptian prime minister, Riad Pasha, a notorious reactionary and
enemy of the nascent nationalist movement in Egypt. Riad Pasha per¬
suaded Afghani to stay in Egypt, and allowed him to take up residence
at Cairo’s 900-year-old A 1 Azhar mosque, considered the center of
Islamic learning worldwide, where he received lodging and a monthly
government stipend. It was Afghani’s first official post as an Islamic
scholar, and the first (but not last) time he would be on the payroll of
one of the imperial powers or their stand-ins. Afghani spent eight years
in the midst of Egypt’s tumultuous politics, up to the eve of England’s
shelling of Alexandria and the British occupation of Egypt.

Feted by the British in India, transported by London to Egypt, and
sponsored by England’s agents in Cairo, Afghani patiently laid the cor¬
nerstone of pan-Islam. But the vicissitudes of Egyptian colonial politics
were not always kind to him: as nationalism in Egypt gained strength
(until crushed by the British), Afghani’s influence declined. In 1879, he
was expelled from Egypt, beginning a sojourn that took him to India,
London, Paris (where he stayed three years), Russia (where he spent four
years), Munich, and Iran. In Iran, the shah made him war minister and
then prime minister, but Afghani and the shah soon parted ways, and
Afghani began agitating against the Persian monarch. Foreshadowing

z6 • Devil’s Game

Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1970s revolution, Afghani took refuge in a
mosque and organized the clergy to support him, until he was arrested
and deported to Turkey. In 1896, his followers would assassinate the
shah, ending that king’s fifty-year reign. Afghani died in 1897.

Always it was Afghani’s secret activities that set him apart.

In the 1870s, in Egypt—while outwardly professing to be a pious
Muslim—Afghani frequented the lodges of the Anglo-Egyptian and
Franco-Egyptian Freemason societies. He delved into mysticism, includ¬
ing Sufism. On his expulsion from Egypt, the British consul-general, in
an intelligence report, said that Afghani “was recently expelled from the
Freemasons’ Lodge at Cairo, of which he was a member, on account of
his open disbelief in a Supreme Being.” According to Kedourie, Afghani
was a member of the General Scotch Lodge, 14 which was organized
around the alleged mysteries of the Egyptian pyramids and the so-called
Grand Architect, the Freemasons’ concept of a god. Many British and
French officials in the nineteenth century were caught up in an obsessive
fascination with the “Orient,” the pyramids, Masonic lore, and assorted
cults of secret brotherhoods, and used these fraternities as channels of
imperial power, often competitively.

It was in the late 1870s that Afghani met the man who would
become his chief disciple, Mohammed Abduh. As a fixture at A 1
Azhar, Cairo’s historic mosque, Afghani gathered around himself a
burgeoning group of acolytes, none more attached to him personally
than Abduh. Born in Egypt in 1849, Abduh was raised by a family of
devout Islamic scholars, and by the age of ten he had memorized the
Koran and was able to recite it in the precise, singsong fashion vener¬
ated by the elders. Like Afghani, Abduh was also drawn to the mysti¬
cal Sufi brotherhoods, with their transcendent view of spiritual life.
Sufism, an ancient current within Islam, challenged many orthodox
Muslim beliefs in favor of a meditative, introspective approach to
“oneness” with God, and the movement gave rise to many tariqa, or
brotherhoods, some organized as tightly bound secret societies and
others as hierarchical mass movements spread over vast geographic
areas.

Abduh was taken with Afghani almost instantly, and they developed
a bond. According to Kedourie, the biographer of Afghani and Abduh,

Imperial Pan-Islam • 27

When Abduh met Afghani he was some twenty-two years old, an
ardent young man going through a crucial phase in his spiritual
life, and this no doubt made him impressionable; but Afghani
must have had a powerful magnetic personality to have exercised
over Abduh then and for many years afterward so strange and
tenacious an influence. The link between them is very much that of
the master and disciple in some secret, esoteric cult . 15

For eight years, between 1871 and 1879, the two men worked
closely together. They organized not only in Egypt, but throughout
the region, and built a diverse collection of followers, some of
whom—including a group of mystical Christians from Syria who
were attracted to Afghani’s offbeat message—founded the Young
Egypt secret society. Gradually, Afghani and Abduh amassed a coterie
of devoted followers around A 1 Azhar. In 1878, Riad Pasha, the prime
minister and Afghani’s protector, went out of his way to appoint
Abduh to a prominent post as a history teacher at Dar al-Ulum, a
newly launched Islamic school, and as professor of language and liter¬
ature at another institution. Eventually, when Riad Pasha’s power
ebbed, Afghani and Abduh left Egypt. In Cairo, nationalists in the
army were gaining momentum, led by the famous Egyptian hero,
Ahmad Arabi, a colonel and war minister, who led an uprising against
the British role in Egypt. Arabi’s movement was crushed, the British
completed their occupation of Egypt, and Arabi was exiled to Ceylon.
Abduh opposed the military’s resistance to the British, advocating a
middle ground, decrying violence, and trying to arrange a compro¬
mise between the army’s fierce nationalism and London’s imperial
designs. Abduh’s chief acolyte and biographer, Rashid Rida, summed
it up: “He was the opponent of the military revolution even though he
was a directing spirit to the intellectual movement. He hated the revo¬
lution and was opposed to its leaders.” 16

There was a pattern here that would endear right-wing Islamists to
Western imperial strategists for generations to come. The opposition
of Afghani and Abduh to Egyptian nationalism, and their support for
vague notions of an Islamic state, foreshadowed the Muslim Brother¬
hood’s opposition to President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s, the

z8 • Devil’s Game

resistance of the Muslim Brotherhood-led Hamas in Palestine to the
nationalism of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and countless
other instances in which Islamists opposed nationalism and left-wing
movements during the Cold War.

Afghani and Abduh did not confine themselves merely to intellec¬
tual theorizing and Islamic scholarship. When Afghani was finally
expelled from Egypt, he and Abduh were accused of organizing “a
secret society composed of ‘young thugs,’ ” apparently a reference to
unruly members of the Masonic lodge that Afghani led, 17 foreshad¬
owing the paramilitary organization established by the Muslim
Brotherhood in the 1930s. Leaving Egypt, Afghani endorsed Abduh
as his fit successor: “I leave you Shaikh Mohammed Abduh, and he is
sufficient for Egypt as a scholar.” 18 Abduh was temporarily exiled to
his village in Egypt, though he would later join Afghani in Paris and
then return to Egypt in triumph, with the full support of the represen¬
tatives of Her Majesty’s imperial officers.

Upon leaving Egypt in 1879, Afghani went to Arabia, then to
India. Soon afterward Afghani, later joined by Abduh, migrated to
Paris, where the two men began their most productive collaboration.
It was in Paris, in the mid-i88os, that Afghani and Abduh built the
network that would continue after their deaths. In 1884, the two men
began publishing a weekly newspaper called The Indissoluble Bond.
Though it lasted only eighteen issues, the paper had great influence.
Exactly how it was financed is unclear, though Kedourie suggests that
it was supported secretly by the French government, to which Afghani
turned after his formal offer in India to become a British agent was
rejected. 19 C. C. Adams, who in 1933 wrote the most complete biog¬
raphy of Abduh, notes that The Indissoluble Bond was “the organ of
a secret organization bearing the same name, founded by [Afghani],
composed of Muslims of India, Egypt, North Africa and Syria, the
purpose of which was to ‘unite Muslims and arouse them from the
sleep and acquaint them with the dangers threatening them and guide
them to the way of meeting these dangers.’ ” 20 Afghani also organized
a pan-Islamic society in Mecca that had as its goal the creation of a
single caliphate to lead the entire Muslim world.

Whether Afghani and Abduh were acting on their own initiative at

Imperial Pan-Islam • Z9

this time, or—more likely—in cooperation with London or Paris, is
unclear. Immediately afterward, however, the French government
halted publication of The Indissoluble Bond, and Afghani and Abduh
traveled to London, ostensibly to discuss the crisis in the Sudan,
where they proposed the notion of a pan-Islamic alliance with Great
Britain. The proposal was advanced in the midst of a tribal-religious
rebellion against the British in the Sudan, led by the charismatic
Mohammed Ahmad, a Sudanese sheikh who proclaimed himself the
Mahdi, or savior, and led a puritanical Islamic revolt. Two versions of
Islamism came into conflict: the Mahdi’s, a feral, angry revolt in
which nationalist sentiments were in part disguised by religious lan¬
guage, and Afghani’s, an Anglophilic version of Islamism that viewed
the Mahdi as primitive and uncouth. In 1885, the forces of the Mahdi,
calling themselves the Helpers of the Prophet, defeated and killed the
celebrated British general, Charles Gordon, and captured Khartoum.
Afghani sought to maintain his pan-Islamic credentials by paying
lip service to the Mahdi, but—continuing to cultivate his British
patrons—he opposed the Sudanese rebel behind the scenes. “I fear, as
all wise men fear, that the dissemination of this doctrine [mahdism]
and the increase of its votaries will harm England and anyone having
rights in Egypt,” wrote Afghani. In a separate piece, entitled “England
on the Shores of the Red Sea,” Afghani argued that the Mahdi was
attracting the support of the “simple-minded.” He suggested in
another article that the Mahdi’s revolt could be met only by an oppos¬
ing challenge that used Islam as its organizing principle. “The strength
of an Islamic preaching,” he wrote, “cannot be met except by an
Islamic resolution, and none but Muslim men can struggle with this
pretender and reduce him to his proper stature.” 21

Afghani, in other words, proposed fighting fire with fire—Islam
with Islam. The British, apparently, did not take him up on this pro¬
posal, a rejection that angered Afghani, though Abduh remained faith¬
ful to London. In going their separate ways, Afghani went to Russia
while Abduh journeyed to Tunis, in North Africa. From there, Abduh
“then traveled incognito in a number of other countries, strengthening
the organization of the society they had founded.” 22 Their message, to
the masses at least, was one of pan-Islam in its purest form:

30 • Devil’s Game

The religion of Islam is the one bond which unites Muslims of all
countries and obliterates all traces of race or nationality. . . . The
Muslim peoples were once united under one glorious empire, and
their achievements in learning and philosophy and all the sciences
are still the boast of all Muslims. It is a duty incumbent upon all
Muslims to aid in maintaining the authority of Islam and Islamic
rule over all lands that have once been Muslim. . . . The only cure
for these nations is to return to the rules of their religion and the
practice of its requirements according to what it was in the begin¬
ning, in the days of the early Caliphs. . .. The supreme authority
over all should be the Koran . 23

Today it seems standard Islamist boilerplate, and could be taken
from the pages of a Muslim Brotherhood tract or an AI Qaeda com¬
munique. But in the 1880s, it was a new concept, and a revolutionary
one. Not in centuries had Muslims heard a challenge to renew their
societies according to the methods of the early caliphs. And the mes¬
sage in this call to arms, published in The Indissoluble Bond, about
restoring Islamic rule “over all lands that have once been Muslim,”
read like a jihad-style summons to recapture parts of Spain, central
Europe, and lands where provinces had fallen to Christianity or other
religions. It was a challenge whose promise would seize T. E.
Lawrence and his British intelligence cohorts at the Arab Bureau in
Cairo during World War I, when London posthumously took up
Afghani and Abduh’s proposal to mobilize Muslims for a new caliph¬
ate, one that could at once undermine the crumbling Turkish empire
and threaten Russia.

Abduh, who had returned to Egypt on occasion in disguise during
his travels in the 1880s, watched as Egypt’s nationalists were scattered
by the British. By the late 1880s Abduh openly cast his lot with Lord
Cromer and the British administration in Egypt. In 1888, with
Cromer’s help, Abduh returned openly to Egypt and took the first of
several official positions in Cairo. Like Afghani, Abduh spoke quietly
about the “social utility of religion.” 24 Kedourie, analyzing his collected
lectures from Beirut, published as Risala, concludes: “It is clear that...
the erstwhile mystic, outwardly a divine, was secretly a free thinker, like

Imperial Pan-Islam • 3

his master.” On returning to Cairo, Abduh forged a partnership with
Lord Cromer, who was the symbol of British imperialism in Egypt.
Born Evelyn Baring, he was a scion of the enormously powerful Baring
banking clan of the City of London, and he had served in the 1870s as
the first British commissioner of the Egyptian public debt office and
then controller general. After London crushed Arabi’s revolt, Baring
returned to Egypt in 1883 as British agent and consul general, and he
served as the virtual ruler of the country until 1907. Abduh and
Cromer became friends and confidants, the militant Islamist and the
aristocratic British empire builder who became his patron. With
Cromer’s backing, Abduh was named to lead a committee to reorganize
A 1 Azhar, became the editor of Egypt’s Official Journal, and was
appointed to Egypt’s Legislative Council, where he became “its leading
member whose opinion on every question was heard with respect. He
was chairman of its most important committees.” 25

Finally, in 1899, two years after Afghani’s death, Abduh was
named mufti of Egypt. As mufti, he “was the supreme interpreter of
the canon law of Islam (the sharia) for the whole country, and his fat-
was, or legal opinions, touching any matters that were referred to
him, were authoritative and final.” 26 It also gave him significant
patronage power, since he helped oversee the rich religious endow¬
ments, or waqfs.

As Abduh’s influence in Egypt grew, Afghani spent a few years in
Russia, where he had gone to sulk after London rejected his offer to
help build a pan-Islamic alliance. According to Kedourie, Afghani, for
a time at least, was “a client and subsequently an agent of Russia.” 27
He reportedly tried to sell Moscow on the idea that he could help
spark a revolt in India, the very heart of the British Empire. According
to a British intelligence report from 1888, Afghani “had impressed
upon some Russian officials the prospect of a general uprising in India
whenever the Russians chose to give the signal.” 28 It seems that the
Russians didn’t buy what Afghani was selling, and soon afterward he
was back in London.

Afghani’s London contacts were diverse. He plunged into a world
that included a swirling mix of freethinkers, Masons, Gnostics, mystics,

3z • Devil’s Game

Sufis and other experimenters in religion and the divine, blended with
writers, travelers, and Orientalists fascinated with the so-called Near
East. It was a heady time. London in the late nineteenth century was
like a gigantic melting pot of religious activism. Many British intellec¬
tuals, and not a few imperialists, were seized with a desire to find a
sort of holy grail, a unified field theory of religious belief. Religious
syncretism won followers among the elites, along with the idea that
perhaps some new cult, some new system of belief, would emerge, one
that could unite the empire’s many cultures. Experimental religions,
some of whose roots went back into the early nineteenth century,
began to flourish—and Afghani, whose view of Islam was tempered
by a deeper commitment to mysticism, the Sufi brotherhoods,
Freemasonry, and philosophical skepticism, was open to it all.

One of Afghani’s most important contacts in London was the
renowned British Orientalist Edward Granville Browne. Browne, a
Cambridge University professor, is perhaps the godfather of twentieth-
century Orientalism, especially in the area of Persian and religious
studies, and he exerted enormous influence not only over academics
but policy makers as well, until his death in 1916. As we shall see,
E. G. Browne was a teacher and friend to the powerful, including two
leading British intelligence operatives, Harry St. John Bridger Philby
and T. E. Lawrence, during Britain’s intense engagement in the Middle
East in World War I. In the 1880s and 1890s, Browne traveled widely
in the Arab world, Turkey, and Persia, and he specialized in cultlike
movements, Sufism, and the alternative mystery religions springing up
in the Middle East.

Browne’s Persian teacher was Mirza Mohammed Baqir. “Having
wandered through half the world,” wrote Browne, “learned (and
learned well) half a dozen languages, and been successively a Shiite
Muhammadan, a dervish, a Christian, an atheist, a Jew, [Baqir] had
finished by elaborating a religious system of his own, which he called
‘Islamo-Christianity.’” 29 The two men became close, and Browne,
inspired by the works of an eccentric specialist in the religions of
central Asia, Joseph de Gobineau, delved into movements like the
Baha’is, developing a lifelong fascination with that odd religious cult.

Imperial Pan-Islam • 3 3

Like Mirza Baqir’s Islamo-Christianity, the Baha’is promoted an odd,
syncretistic faith based in Persia, with outposts in Haifa and else¬
where. For years, the Baha’is were viewed with suspicion in the
Middle East, with many conspiracy-minded political and religious
leaders accusing them of Masonic connections and ties to British
intelligence. But the Baha’is were openly Anglophiles, and after World
War I, one of the Baha’is’ founders, Abdul Baha, was knighted by the
government of Great Britain. Browne became perhaps the chief publi¬
cist in the West for the Baha’is, and he apparently believed that the
Baha’i movement was destined to play a shaping role in the future of
religion in the Middle East.

Both Afghani and Abduh had multiple contacts with Browne,
Mirza Baqir, and the Baha’is. According to Kedourie, Abduh and
Baqir debated theology and the Koran in Paris during the time when
Afghani and Abduh were publishing The Indissoluble Bond, and
Afghani sent the newspaper to the Baha’i movement’s leaders in their
Middle East headquarters. Another person who played an important
role in furthering Afghani’s increasing involvement in Persia—where
he would eventually become prime minister—was Malkam Khan.
Malkam Khan was the Persian ambassador to London for many
years, the son of the founder of the Persian Society of Freemasons.
Like Afghani, the Baha’is, and Baqir, Khan believed that a reformed,
universalist “religion of humanity” was the prerequisite for political
action in the Middle East, especially in Persia. Even though Afghani
never abandoned his rhetorical support for a fundamentalist version
of Islam, under Khan’s influence Afghani formed the “Arab Masonic
society.” 30 The chameleon-like Afghani seemed to believe in combin¬
ing a simplistic version of Islam for the “simple-minded,” or the
masses, with a top-down, syncretistic one-world religion above it.

But Afghani’s career ended, partially at least, in failure. With the
support of Malkam Khan, he spent most of his final years in Persia, as
war minister and prime minister, but his ideas didn’t succeed in win¬
ning over either the shah or the Iranian elite. Tired of Afghani’s
appeals to Iran’s mullahs, the shah acted. “The Shah finally violated
the sanctuary of the mosque and had Jamal arrested, although on a

34 ‘ Devil’s Game

sick bed at the time, and conveyed to the Turkish border.” 31 He would
bounce back and forth between Turkey, Afghanistan, and Persia dur¬
ing the 1890s, “attracting,” Kedourie says, “the attention ... of secu¬
rity and intelligence departments.” 32 At the very end of his life, the
British bailed him out once more. “In 1895 Afghani, then at Istanbul,
some two years before his death finding himself in Sultan Abdul
Hamid’s bad books, and threatened with extradition to Persia where he
was wanted for subversion, applied to the British Ambassador for pro¬
tection as an Afghan subject.” 33 The British consulate gave Afghani a
pass, allowing him to leave the sultan’s territory. He eventually returned
to Turkey, where the itinerant pan-Islamist died of cancer in 1897. E. G.
Browne ensured that Afghani’s fame would last long beyond his death
by lionizing him in his 1910 classic The Persian Revolution.

But Lord Cromer, ever the practical imperialist, wrote perhaps the
ultimate epitaph for Afghani, Abduh, and the first generation of
Islamic revivalists. “They were much too tainted with heterodoxy to
carry far along with the conservative Moslems. Nor were they suffi¬
ciently Europeanized to win the mimics of European ways. They were
neither good enough Moslems, nor good enough Europeans.” Like a
scientist closing the books on an experiment that failed, Lord Cromer
concluded that the pan-Islam of Afghani and Abduh needed a major
revision. Its Masonic-tinged, universalist modernism didn’t blend well
with a call to return to seventh-century Islamic purism, and so it had
failed to win the allegiance of either the clergy or the modernizers.
Eventually, Afghani’s ideas, preserved by the journalist Rashid Rida,
who founded The Lighthouse, the publication that brought Afghani
and Abduh’s ideas to the Egyptian Salafiyya and the Mus¬
lim Brotherhood, would find more fertile soil. In the meantime, the
British would turn to a much less ambiguous version of Islamist radi¬
calism in the next phase of their colonial policy in the Middle East:
Saudi Arabian Wahhabism.

Imperial Pan-Islam • 3 5

Abdullah Philby’s Brotherhood

From 1899 through the aftermath of World War I, Great Britain
embarked on one of the most remarkable imperial gambits ever con¬
ceived. The Ottoman Empire, the nineteenth century’s “sick man of
Europe,” was finally in its death throes. The rise of the imperial navies,
railroads, and finally the development of the internal combustion
engine and the automobile created an insatiable demand for oil.
Despite the growth of Texas, Romania, and Baku as centers of oil pro¬
duction, it had also begun to dawn on imperial strategists that Persia,
Iraq, and Arabia had untold petroleum wealth. Hard-headed impe¬
rialists saw southwest Asia as a gigantic chess board, and they were
playing for keeps. London’s gambit was to make a play for the loyalty
of the world’s Muslims, not by appealing to the Islamic world’s
enlightened, modernizing Muslim elite but to its traditionalist-minded
masses and autocrats.

While fending off the French in the Middle East, the British had
simultaneously to deal with three other powers. The Russians, seem¬
ing to press inexorably down from the north, were one concern. The
Germans, whose global power was expanding under the Kaiser, were
fast building ties to Turkey while making plans to construct a rail line
from Berlin to Baghdad. And the Turks, whose empire’s life force was
ebbing, still had an ace in the hole, namely, the existence of a
caliphate in Istanbul that, nominally at least, could claim the alle¬
giance of orthodox Sunni Muslims everywhere.

London was firmly in control of India (including, of course, what
is now Muslim Pakistan), and thanks to Lord Cromer the British had
locked up Egypt and the Suez Canal as their lifeline to India. They had
significant, even dominant influence in Afghanistan and Persia. And
they had important surrounding real estate, from Cyprus to East
Africa to Aden that could be used to bring power to bear in the Per¬
sian Gulf. For their gambit to seize control of Iraq and Arabia, they
needed a force to challenge Turkey’s control of that vast expanse of
sand-covered territory.

The first step in accomplishing that feat was the forging of an

36 • Devil’s Game

alliance for the English throne with the future king of Saudi Arabia—
and with the long-established Wahhabi Islamic movement. To under¬
stand how the British-Saudi alliance developed, we must first take a
step back into the eighteenth century, when the entente between the
Al Saud, the future royal family, and the A 1 Shaikh, the Wahhabi fam¬
ily of the Islamists, was first cemented.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, an itinerant Muslim
preacher, sort of an Arabian Elmer Gantry, began crisscrossing the
northern reaches of the peninsula and the Fertile Crescent, from
Mecca and Medina to the al-Hasa Oasis in the east to Basra, Baghdad,
and Damascus. Mohammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, born in 1703, was
not a city dweller, and he didn’t bother with the kind of learning that
occurred in the Arab world’s intellectual centers. Spreading the
Islamic version of fire and brimstone, Abdul Wahhab thundered that
the Muslims needed to purge themselves of everything that had been
learned since the days of the Prophet a thousand years before. It was a
revivalist movement in the classic sense, with eager followers packing
tents thrown up by Abdul Wahhab’s organizers.

Abdul Wahhab’s most important convert was the founder of the Al
Saud dynasty, Mohammed ibn Saud. Ibn Saud apparently saw himself
as an eighteenth-century version of the Prophet Mohammed, con¬
quering lands for Islam and imposing his faith on the conquered. To
reinforce their message, Abdul Wahhab, Ibn Saud, and their followers
had the unfortunate habit of slaughtering anyone who disagreed with
them and demolishing their cities, their mosques, and their shrines.

Abdul Wahhab was called “the Teacher,” or al-shaikh in Arabic,
and from then on the descendants of the Abdul Wahhab clan were
called the Al Shaikh. 34 The alliance between the Al Saud and the Al
Shaikh families evolved into the Saudi state in the 1920s. It wasn’t
without its ups and downs, however; from the 1700s through the
1920s, the Al Saud repeatedly founded states that would, in turn, be
swept away either by the more worldly, and less fanatical, Ottomans
and their allies in Egypt, or by rival Arabian tribes.

In standard accounts of the rise of the Wahhabis, it is usually said,
often with respect, that the Wahhabis were reformers and moderniz¬
ers, or that they united the Arabian Peninsula around the idea of

Imperial Patt-Islam • 3 7

tawhid, or monotheism. (The term Wahhabism is considered some¬
what insulting by its adherents, who prefer the term Unitarians, from
“unity of God.”) 35 And Wahhab is often described as a thinker, whose
philosophical work and interpretation of the Koran were ground¬
breaking. Not so. Hamid Algar, author of Wahhabism: A Critical
Essay, notes that the Arabian desert and Abdul Wahhab’s so-called
theology had something in common. “Its topographical barrenness
seems always to have been reflected in its intellectual history,” he
writes. 36 In discussing “what might charitably be called the scholarly
output of Muhammad b. Abd al-Wahhab,” Algar says that his works
are simplistic and superficial, comprised mostly of reprinted collec¬
tions of the Prophet’s sayings and containing little or no “elucidation
or commentary.” Even the custodians of Wahhabism, notes Algar
wryly, are “embarrassed by the slightness of [his] opus.” 37 A great
thinker he was not.

But Abdul Wahhab was a master at hurling polemical thunder¬
bolts at moderate Muslims, accusing them of abandoning Islam, of
apostasy, of heresies, and worse. Joining forces with the A 1 Saud, the
Wahhabis assembled a mighty army of followers, who spent centuries
wreaking havoc across Arab territory. They were, in the words of a
nineteenth-century English writer, notorious for “preferring slaughter
to booty” in their conquests. 38 The slaughter never ended. In the
1700s, the Saud-Wahhabi alliance began a “campaign of killing and
plunder all across Arabia,” first in central Arabia, then in Asir in
southern Arabia and parts of Yemen, and finally in Riyadh and the
Hijaz. 39 In 1802 they raided the Shiite holy city of Karbala in what is
now Iraq, killing most of the city’s population, destroying the dome
over the grave of a founder of Shiism, and looting “property,
weapons, clothing, carpets, gold, silver, [and] precious copies of the
Quran.” 40 In fact, Wahhabism would be weirdly marked by a “signa¬
ture activity of dome demolition.” 41 Domes in Mecca, too, would be
destroyed in the early part of the nineteenth century. (It is a practice
that continues today. In the former Yugoslavia, Saudi Arabia would
demand radical changes in Islamic sites. “Saudi aid agencies,” wrote
John Esposito, “have been responsible for the destruction or recon¬
struction of many historic mosques, libraries, Quran schools, and

38 • Devil’s Game

cemeteries in Bosnia and Kosovo because their Ottoman architecture,
decorations, frescoes, and tombstones did not conform to Wahhabi
iconoclastic aesthetics.”) 42

As the dome-destroyers expanded their power in Arabia, they ulti¬
mately came into contact with Great Britain. England’s ties to the A 1
Saud began in the mid-nineteenth century, when a British colonel
made contact with the House of Saud in Riyadh, the sleepy desert city
that would eventually be the capital of Arabia. “The first contact was
made in 1865, and British subsidies started to flow into the coffers of
the Saudi family, in ever growing quantity as World War One grew
closer,” reports Algar. 43

In 1899, Lord Curzon, then viceroy of India, carved out the pro¬
tectorate of Kuwait, and London’s ties to the A 1 Saud and the Wah¬
habis began in earnest. The A 1 Saud, struggling to impose their will in
Arabia, were invited to establish a base in Kuwait, a tiny emirate
south of Basra that was increasingly an outpost of British imperial
power and control. 44 Just three years later, the A 1 Saud would begin
the final effort to secure control over the whole of the Arabian Penin¬
sula. “The Amir of Kuwait,” according to an account, “dispatched
Ibn Saud, then just twenty years old, to try to retake Riyadh from the
[pro-Ottoman] Rashids.” 45 Riyadh fell to Ibn Saud in 1902, and it
was during this period that Ibn Saud established the fearsome Broth¬
erhood, known by their Arabic name, the Ikhwan. 46 He collected
fighters from Bedouin tribes, fired them up with fanatical religious
zeal, and threw them into battle. By 1912, the Brotherhood numbered
11,000, and Ibn Saud had both central Arabia’s Nejd and al-Hasa in
the east under his control.

Between 1899 and the outbreak of World War I, rumors of oil in
the Middle East became reality. The first oil “concessions”—really
one-sided, imperialist deals imposed by oil men backed by great-
power gunboats on weak vassal states and captive tribal leaders—
were signed. Suddenly the Persian Gulf emerged as a strategic site.
Arabia and the Gulf had been viewed by Great Britain as one link in a
chain that ran from Suez to India, the two anchors of the empire.
Slowly, the reverse seemed truer: Suez and India would, increasingly,
be seen as bases from which the British would be able to protect their

Imperial Pan-Islam • 3 9

burgeoning oil interests in southern Persia, Iraq, and the Gulf.
William Shakespear, the felicitously named British officer who was
appointed political agent in Kuwait, became the first of several leg¬
endary British liaisons to the A 1 Saud, and he forged the first formal
treaty between England and Saudi Arabia, which was signed in 1915.
Punctuating his accomplishment, Shakespear died in battle alongside
the A 1 Saud in a desert confrontation with the rival A 1 Rashid tribe.
But the treaty he designed bound London and Arabia, years before
Saudi Arabia was a country. “It formally recognized Ibn Saud as the
independent ruler of the Nejd and its Dependencies under British pro¬
tection. In return, Ibn Saud undertook to follow British advice.” 47

With the outbreak of war in 1914, Great Britain saw a golden
opportunity to oust Turkey from Arabia. As the Ottoman Empire
wobbled, two British teams backed two distinct—and opposing—
Arab players in the barren, desert stretches of the Arabian peninsula.

The first team was led by Harry St. John Bridger Philby, a British
operative well schooled in the political utility of religious belief by
none other than E. G. Browne. Scion of a modestly distinguished
British family with ties to Ceylon and India, Philby was a product of
England’s most prestigious schools, including Westminster, where he
was a Queen’s Scholar, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he
became a disciple of E. G. Browne’s. 48 At the dawn of the twentieth cen¬
tury, Cambridge was a training ground for empire builders, and he
rubbed elbows there with England’s (and the world’s) best and bright¬
est. Grounded in the ties between church and state in England, and
with an intimate familiarity with the Anglican establishment, Philby,
though an atheist, exhibited a strong appreciation of religion’s influence
on politics, and he described religious belief as “of all conventions the
greatest,... so strong in its resistance to all opposition.” 49 At Cam¬
bridge he studied philosophy, oriental languages, and Indian law, and
then joined the Indian Civil Service. Philby—who would later undergo
a sham conversion to Islam, adopting the name “Abdullah”—would
carry Browne’s lessons with him to India, where he served as a minor
functionary, and then to Arabia, where he succeeded Shakespear as
Great Britain’s liaison to Ibn Saud.

While Philby’s team, Britain’s India Office, backed the A 1 Saud,

40 • D

l ’ s Game

their friendly rivals were based in Cairo at the Arab Bureau, a branch
of British intelligence, which sponsored the famous T. E. Lawrence
(“of Arabia”). The Arab Bureau backed the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein,
head of the Hashemite dynasty, and his sons, Abdullah and Faisal.
They were the rulers of the Hijaz, the province in western Arabia that
included Mecca and Medina. The A 1 Saud, meanwhile, controlled
most of central Arabia’s Nejd from Riyadh, which is now the Saudi
capital. In the end, of course, the A 1 Saud would conquer Arabia and
name the country after their family. The Hashemite sons, Abdullah
and Faisal, having lost to the Saudis, would be installed like replace¬
ment parts as kings of two other nations whose borders were drawn
up by Winston Churchill: Abdullah as king of Transjordan, and Faisal
as king of Iraq.

In both cases—the A 1 Saud and the Hashemites—the British
sought to mobilize Islam. The Hashemites boasted that their family
was directly descended from that of the Prophet Mohammed, a claim
made by any number of scurrilous would-be rulers in the past century.
The British, naturally, saw the Hashemites as potential claimants to a
new, and pro-British, caliphate based in Mecca. The A 1 Saud, pro¬
pelled by the warriors of Wahhabism, were a formidable Islamic
strike force that, the British believed, would help London gain control
of the western shores of the Persian Gulf.

Initially, around 1916, it seemed that the Hashemites had the upper
hand. Because of their position atop Mecca and Medina, the British
believed that Hussein and his sons could rally Muslims from North
Africa to India to the British cause. At the time, the tottering Ottomans
controlled a decrepit caliphate, which nominally exercised sway over
religious Muslims worldwide. But the Ottomans were besieged on all
sides, and the British took the lead trying to use Islamic loyalties as a
force against the Turks. It was a policy cooked up by London’s Middle
East team: Lord Curzon, the ultraimperialist foreign secretary and
former governor of India; the aristocratic Robert Cecil, and his cousin,
Arthur Lord Balfour, who with Rothschild backing promised Palestine
to the Jews; Mark Sykes, the duplicitous chief of the Foreign Office’s
Middle East section; and David George (“D. G.”) Hogarth, the head

Imperial Part-Islam • 4:

of the Arab Bureau, the author of The Penetration of Arabia, and an
archaeologist, Orientalist, and keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at
Oxford. Churchill, Arnold Toynbee, and other leading lights of
British imperialism joined in. Outlining the policy, Lawrence said:

If the Sultan of Turkey were to disappear, then the Caliphate by
common consent of Islam would fall to the family of the prophet,
rhe present representative of which is Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca.
Hussein’s activities seem beneficial to us, because it marches with
our immediate aims, the breakup of the Islamic bloc and the dis¬
ruption of the Ottoman Empire, and because the states he would
set up would be as harmless to ourselves as Turkey was. If properly
handled the Arab States would remain in a state of political
mosaic, a tissue of jealous principalities incapable of cohesion, and
yet always ready to combine against an outside force.

The idea seemed simple enough. The Hashemites would stage an anti-
Ottoman revolt, complete with swashbuckling, romantic images of
Arabs led by Lawrence charging across the sand to liberate them¬
selves from Turkish rule. Behind the scenes, Britain would try to forge
an alliance between the Hashemites and the Zionists, with the goal
of installing a pro-British Jewish state in Palestine, and with the
Hashemites ruling present-day Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, and the
Hijaz along Arabia’s west coast. Uniting it all would be a Mecca-
based, and British-controlled, Arab caliphate. Egypt and Sudan, of
course, would remain in the British camp, too.

Philby, meanwhile, was working the eastern flank. Sir Percy Cox,
the political representative of the India Office in the Persian Gulf, was
the man in charge of England’s effort to secure the precious oil territo¬
ries, whose potential was just beginning to emerge. Philby, then a jun¬
ior officer, worked with Cox and with the legendary explorer and
super spy, Gertrude Bell, whose intimate knowledge of Arabian tribal
lore and the genealogies of its families, along with her expert linguistic
abilities, made her an essential member of the team. Cox dispatched
Philby to meet Ibn Saud in 1916. While London was mobilizing the
Meccans against the Turks in western Arabia, Philby was assigned to

42 • Devil’s Game

marshal the A 1 Saud against another warlord clan, the A 1 Rashid, who
had the misfortune to ally itself with the Turks in eastern Arabia.

Beginning in January 1917, Ibn Saud was put on a £5,000
monthly retainer, and Philby was the bagman. 50 Off and on after that,
Philby would serve as Ibn Saud’s British handler, and met him on
dozens of occasions. In 1919, he escorted Ibn Saud’s fourteen-year-
old son, the future King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, on a tour of London
that included visits to Philby’s old Pied Piper, E. G. Browne, and to
Wilfred Scawen Blunt, perhaps England’s leading advocate of pro-
British pan-Islam.

Britain’s imperial exercise in redrawing the map of the Middle East
and building a new caliphate foundered, however. Great Britain, of
course, remained the dominant player in the region by virtue of its
sheer imperial power. But the Arab-Zionist deal didn’t quite work,
and Iraq proved troublesome, and deadly, for British troops. Further¬
more, the French insisted on booting the British out of Syria and
Lebanon, and the Bolsheviks took over Russia and revealed details
about secret Anglo-French understandings that proved exceedingly
embarrassing to London. And, though London placed most of its
chips on Hussein’s Hashemites, Ibn Saud’s legions swept through Ara¬
bia, conquering all before them—including Hussein’s mini-realm in
the Hijaz. Gertrude Bell, speaking of Iraq but in a manner that could
have referred to Britain’s entire Middle East policy, said, “We have
made an immense failure here.” 51

Philby, still in British service, maintained his connection to the A 1
Saud. Indeed, he seemed almost to worship the uncouth Ibn Saud and
his Bedouin thugs, the Ikhwan:

The Arab is a democrat [wrote Philby], and the greatest and most
powerful Arab ruler of the present day is proof of it. Ibn Saud is
no more than primus inter pares; his strength lies in the fact that
he has for twenty years accurately interpreted the aspirations and
will of his people. 52

Though Philby often postured as an advocate of democracy and Arab
republicanism, he never wavered from supporting the brutal Al Saud

Imperial Pan-Islam • 4 3

dynasty. 53 Even some of Britain’s most hard-core imperialists, includ¬
ing D. G. Hogarth, saw the A 1 Saud, and in particular their Wahhabi
warriors, the Ikhwan, as rather unsavory. “To men [like Hogarth]
with experience of Islam in India, Egypt, Syria, Turkey and the
Hijaz, the proselytizing of Ibn Saud’s Ikhwan was a menace, and
Wahhabism a fanatical creed unsuited to most of the Islamic world,”
wrote Philby’s biographer. 54

In the 1920s conquest of Arabia, Philby’s “democrats,” the A 1
Saud, left 400,000 dead and wounded, carried out 40,000 public exe¬
cutions, and ordered, under its strict interpretation of Islamic law,
350,000 amputations. 55 The scorched-earth battles by which the
Ikhwan conquered Arabia for the A 1 Saud gave Britain an unbroken
chain of vassal states and colonies from the Mediterranean to India.
Yet even as the Saudi state was being established, the bloody Ikhwan
were seen by some in London, and by some Arabs, as a double-edged
sword. A Lebanese friend of Ibn Saud’s described the Ikhwan thus:
“Today a sword in the hand of the prince, a dagger in his back tomor¬
row.” 56 Hussein, the British-backed Sharif of Mecca, pleaded with
London to force Ibn Saud to dismantle the Ikhwan. In a missive to the
British Agent in Jeddth in 1918, Hussein wrote: “What concerns me
above everything else ... is that H.M.G. should compel [Ibn Saud] to
abolish and disperse what he calls the Ikhwan—the political society in
the cloak of religion.” The British coolly refused. 57

Ibn Saud tried to maintain that the Ikhwan were an independent
force, but the British knew otherwise, of course. “He does not want it
to be known that he himself is at the bottom of the whole thing, and is
fostering and guiding the movement for his own ends,” cabled a
British official in 1920. Yet, other, far less well informed British offi¬
cials warned, rather stupidly it would now seem, that the Ikhwan
were Bolshevik-inspired! 58

Theoretically, at least, Ibn Saud still had the option of creating a
secular state, one in which fundamentalist Islam would not have an
official part. But he was propelled by the momentum of his alliance
with the Wahhabis and with the Ikhwan, as the shrewd British politi¬
cal officer Percy Cox realized:

44 ' Devil’s Game

In late 1915 or early 1916 Ibn Saud found that Ikhwanism was
definitely gaining control of affairs in Najd. He saw that he had to
make one of two decisions: either to be a temporal ruler and crush
Ikhwanism, or to become the spiritual head of this new Wah¬
habism. ... In the end he was compelled to accept its doctrines
and become its leader, lest he should go under himself. S9

The Islamic fundamentalist movement that Ibn Saud rode to power
was essential to the origin of Saudi Arabia. He utilized Islam to break
down tribal loyalties and replace those loyalties with adherence to the
cult. “In a desert, tribal society, where the family was an individual’s
security, identity, and legitimacy, the renunciation of all this was no
light matter,” wrote John S. Habib. “It underscored the degree to
which Ibn Saud was able to substitute the brotherhood of Islam domi¬
ciled in the bijra 60 for the protection, security, and identity which they
surrendered when they left the tribe.” 61

When the dust had cleared after World War I, and after the various
imperial conferences that established the boundaries of the Middle
East’s states, the Ottoman Empire had been dismantled, Britain
reigned supreme in the region, and Ibn Saud controlled the bulk of
Arabia. According to Philby, Ibn Saud’s Ikhwan numbered more than
50,000 by the 1920s. 62 To the west, in the Hijaz, the Hashemites still
ruled, but their time was running out. In 1924, the new Turkish gov¬
ernment under the modernizing Mustafa Kemal Ataturk disdained
the backwardness of official Islam and shocked conservative Muslims
worldwide by peremptorily abolishing the caliphate. Hussein, the
Anglophile Sharif of Mecca, tried to capitalize on Ataturk’s action.
Perhaps remembering T. E. Lawrence’s grand design, Hussein pro¬
claimed himself caliph, but unfortunately for him, no one was listen¬
ing. The British had essentially abandoned Hussein by then, having
chosen to ride with Ibn Saud and another up-and-coming Muslim
fanatic, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem. “Philby,”
wrote Monroe, “returning from Syria in this moment of Muslim
uncertainty, entered in his diary that Hussein’s power in Arabia was
confined to the Hijaz coast, and that his gesture about the caliphate
was meaningless when set against the bright light of Ibn Saud’s star

Imperial Pan-Islam • 4 5

rising over the Arabian desert.” 63 Soon afterward Ibn Saud’s hordes
swept into the Hijaz, ousting the Hashemites, slaughtering hundreds
of men, women, and children, and unifying Arabia under the control
of Riyadh. So began the modern Saudi state. And Philby, still close to
Ibn Saud, was there at the creation.

Ibn Saud set out immediately to establish himself as the uncrowned
king of Islam, but it was a process that developed slowly. “A formal
treaty between Ibn Saud and Great Britain, recognizing the full inde¬
pendence of the kingdom, was signed on May 20, 1927,” wrote
Bernard Lewis. “Muslim recognition was slower and more reluctant.”
He added:

A Muslim mission from India visited Jeddah and demanded that
the king hand over control of the holy places to a committee of rep¬
resentatives to be appointed by all Muslim countries. Ibn Saud did
not respond to this demand and sent the mission back to India by
sea. In June of the same year he convened an all-Islamic Congress
in Mecca, inviting the sovereigns and presidents of the independent
Muslim states and representatives from Muslim organizations in
countries under non-Muslim rule. Sixty-nine people attended the
congress from all over the Islamic world. Addressing them, Ibn
Saud made it clear that he was now the ruler of the Hijaz. ... At
the time he evoked a mixed response from his guests. Some dis¬
sented and departed; others accepted and recognized the new
order. 64

Ibn Saud also finally had to confront the Ikhwan. By the late
1920s, their job done, the Ikhwan were restless, and increasingly
resented Ibn Saud’s monarchy. They clashed, and by 1929 Ibn Saud
had dismantled the Ikhwan and transformed remnants of the Bedouin
force into the Saudi armed forces. Still, having crushed the Ikhwan,
Ibn Saud did not abandon Wahhabism. Indeed, to consolidate his
power in the more worldly, and less religious, Hijaz, the king created
the religious police to enforce five-times-a-day prayer, dress codes,
and other strictures of orthodox Wahhabism. In the early 1930s Ibn
Saud also created the Society for the Propagation of Virtue and the
Suppression of Evil, who were composed of “illiterate, fanatical

46 • Devil’s Game

Bedouin who were only too eager to enforce the literal prescriptions
of prayer, and the closing of shops during prayer time, in addition to
the prohibition of smoking and other ‘immoral’ habits.” 65 It still
exists.

For the British, the emergence of the state of Saudi Arabia gave
London a foothold at the very heart of Islam, in Mecca and Medina.
For the more pragmatic among Britain’s imperial strategists, it seemed
that Ibn Saud’s armed forces proved themselves to be of greater worth
than the mystic-theological currents advanced by Afghani and Abduh
and their secret societies. And clearly, London’s experiment with
Afghani and Abduh was not completely successful. Afghani, in partic¬
ular, proved to be an elusive imperial asset, and while his vision of a
pan-Islamic alliance might have appeared attractive to the British
elite, it failed to capture the imagination of the masses and it met with
determined opposition from rulers in Turkey and Persia.

The creation of the Saudi state by the British gave Islamism a base
out of which it would operate for decades to come. For England, and
then for the United States, Saudi Arabia would serve as an anchor for
imperial ambitions throughout the twentieth century. Yet Wahhabism,
for all its power, was still primarily a religious, not political, force. It
could win the devout allegiance of Saudis, and it could be proselytized
to Sunnis far and wide. But in the modern sense, true political Islam had
not yet emerged. Missing was a mass-based Islamist political force
that could hold its own against the new century’s most attractive anti¬
imperialist ideologies, communism and nationalism. Yet the seeds
planted by Afghani and Abduh were about to sprout. Watered and
carefully tended by Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabis and the British intelli¬
gence service, a new Islamist force was about to arise on soil sown by
Abduh. For the first time, a true grassroots Islamic fundamentalist
party would begin in a city on the Suez Canal, not far from Saudi Ara¬
bia: Ismailia, Egypt.

ENGLAND’S BROTHERS

In its post-World War I struggle to maintain its empire, Great
Britain made deals with many devils. From the late 1920s until the
failed invasion of Suez in 1956, those pacts included support for two
fledgling Islamist movements in Egypt and Palestine. In Egypt, in
1928, a young Islamic scholar named Hassan al-Banna founded the
Muslim Brotherhood, the organization that would change the course
of history in the twentieth-century Middle East. And his Palestinian
confrere was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the demagogic mufti of Jeru¬
salem. Both Banna and Haj Amin would play important roles in the
growth of Islamism in the decades after World War I—and, like the
Saudi royal family, both owed their start to British support.

Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood was established with a grant from
England’s Suez Canal Company, and over the next quarter century
British diplomats, the intelligence service MI6, and Cairo’s Anglophilic
King Farouq would use the Muslim Brotherhood as a cudgel against
Egypt’s communists and nationalists—and later against President
Gamal Abdel Nasser. Meanwhile, in Palestine, Haj Amin, the Nazi-
leaning, viciously anti-Semitic firebrand, climbed to power beginning in
the 1920s with overt backing from the British overseers of the Palestine
Mandate. Together, Banna and Haj Amin would be responsible for the

48 • Devil’s G

worldwide spread of political Islam. The two men tied Wahhabi-style
ultra-orthodoxy to the pan-Islamic ideals of Jamal Eddine al-Afghani
and—with Saudi funding—created the global enterprise that spawned
Islam’s radical right, including its terrorist wing.

London’s relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood was complex.

Although the British supported the organization at its founding,
and although the organization may have received support from Brit¬
ish intelligence in the subsequent years, the Brotherhood—and politi¬
cal Islam—was only one force in an ever-shifting political universe in
Egypt and the broader Middle East. The British and the king used
Banna’s group—especially its underground, paramilitary arm and its
assassins—when it suited them, but kept a wary eye on the organiza¬
tion, which sometimes turned against them. As the Muslim Brother¬
hood gained strength, eventually claiming several hundred thousand
members in Egypt alone, with branches in Jerusalem, Damascus, and
Amman, it became an important player in Egyptian politics. As such, it
drew attention from a number of foreign intelligence services over the
years, from the Nazis and the KGB to the U.S. Office of Strategic Ser¬
vices and the CIA.

The Muslim Brotherhood exploded onto the scene at a time when
British power in the Near East, though nearly universal, was also
unsettled.

As the smoke cleared after World War I, England reigned supreme
in the region, but uneasily so. The flag of the British empire was every¬
where from the Mediterranean to India. A new generation of kings
and potentates ruled a string of British-dominated colonies, man¬
dates, vassal states, and semi-independent fiefdoms in Egypt, Iraq,
Transjordan, Arabia, and Persia. To varying degrees, those monar¬
chies were beholden to London, but not without occasional, tentative
attempts to claim some authority for themselves. The kings were
trapped between two conflicting forces: on the one hand, in each of
those states, an anti-monarchical nationalist movement began to take
shape; on the other hand, the British Foreign Office and London’s
colonial officials were breathing down their necks. Juggling factions
like balls in the air, the British spent the years between 1918 and 1945

England’s Brothers • 49

trying to balance the king, the tribal leaders, the emerging middle
classes, the army, and the clergy in each of these states, always with an
eye toward preserving British power. Sometimes the king would get
too strong, and form an alliance with the army; in that case the British
would try to break the alliance of king and generals by favoring tribal
chieftains instead. Sometimes, if the tribes or ethnic groups got too
uppity, the British would deputize the army to crush them.

The Islamic right emerged amid this shifting balance. It provided a
vital counterweight to England’s chief nemeses: the nationalists and
the secular left.

Islam’s Anti-nationalists

The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, was
the direct outgrowth of the pan-Islamic movement of Afghani and
Abduh. The transmission belt for that influence was Rashid Rida, a
Syrian who had arrived in Egypt in 1897. Rashid Rida, who had
received a religious education in Tripoli, in what is now Lebanon’s
Sunni stronghold, had been an avid follower of The Indissoluble
Bond, Afghani and Abduh’s weekly, and when he arrived in Cairo he
sought out Abduh, the soon-to-be mufti of Egypt, and became his
chief acolyte. In 1898, Rashid Rida founded the publication The
Lighthouse, x a weekly eight-page newspaper that was explicitly
aimed at carrying on the tradition of the pan-Islamic Bond. Unlike
Afghani and Abduh, who operated through secret societies, under¬
ground groups, and the Masonic movement, Rashid Rida advocated
the establishment of an aboveground “Islamic Society,” with its head¬
quarters at Mecca and with branches in every Muslim country. 2

Though Rashid Rida never managed to found the society he
wanted—that would await Hassan al-Banna—he created the Society of
Propaganda and Guidance as an early forerunner of the Muslim Broth¬
erhood. At the time, Abduh enjoyed the patronage of Lord Cromer, the
absolute ruler of Egypt at the turn of the century, and the work of
Rashid Rida could not have occurred without British acquiescence.

50 • Devil’s Game

According to C. C. Adams, The Lighthouse consistently attacked the
nascent nationalist movement in Egypt, which was secular in nature,
and the nationalists hit back at Rashid Rida. The Lighthouse also
welcomed the growth of Saudi power:

A new star of hope has appeared with the rise of the Wahhabi
dynasty of Ibn Saud in Arabia. The Government of Ibn Saud is the
greatest Muslim power in the world today, since the fall of the
Ottoman dynasty and the transformation of the Government of
the Turks into a government without religion, and it is the only
government that will give aid to the Sunnah and repudiate harm¬
ful innovations and anti-religionism. 3

Nationalists, in both Egypt and Turkey, were deemed “atheists and
infidels” by Rashid Rida. 4

The Society of Propaganda and Guidance, and its related Institute
of Propaganda and Guidance, were established in Cairo with financ¬
ing from wealthy Arabs from India. Its enrollees included students
from as far away as Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Central Asia, and
East Africa. They formed a second wave of the international cadre for
an Islamist movement, after the secret societies tied to The Indissolu¬
ble Bond. Prominent Egyptian sheikhs and other religious leaders
formed what came to be known as the “Lighthouse Party,” made up
of followers of Abduh and Rashid Rida collected around A 1 Azhar
and including various leaders of the mystical Sufi brotherhoods. In
opposition to the new Nationalist Party, they helped establish a sec¬
ond Egyptian political formation called the Peoples Party, which
included followers of Abduh and Rashid Rida. The Peoples Party,
reputedly created with British support, openly supported the British
occupation of Egypt, and it won plaudits from Lord Cromer, who
described its members as a “small but increasing number of Egyptians
of whom comparatively little is heard.” In his 1906 Annual Report,
Lord Cromer wrote: “The main hope of Egyptian Nationalism, in the
only true and practicable sense of the word, lies, in my opinion, with
those who belong to this party.” 5

Rashid Rida’s chief acolyte was Hassan al-Banna.

It is impossible to overestimate the importance and legacy of Hassan

England’s Brothers • 51

al-Banna. The twenty-first-century War on Terrorism is a war against
the offspring of Banna and his Brothers. They show up everywhere—in
the attorney general’s office in Sudan, on Afghanistan’s battlefields, in
Hama in Syria, atop Saudi Arabia’s universities, in bomb-making facto¬
ries in Gaza, as ministers in the government of Jordan, in posh banking
centers in the Gulf sheikhdoms, and in the post-Saddam Hussein gov¬
ernment of Iraq.

To get the Muslim Brotherhood off the ground, the Suez Canal
Company helped Banna build the mosque in Ismailia that would serve
as its headquarters and base of operations, according to Richard
Mitchell’s The Society of the Muslim Brothers . 6 The fact that Banna
created the organization in Ismailia is itself significant. Ismailia, today
a city of zoo,000 at the northern end of the canal, was founded in
1863 by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the canal’s builder. For England, the
Suez Canal was the indispensable route to its prize possession, India,
and in 1928 the sleepy backwater town happened to house not only
the company’s offices but a major British military base built during
World War I. It was also, in the 1920s, a center of pro-British senti¬
ment in Egypt.

Mitchell reports that Banna was closely associated with Rashid
Rida. 7 Banna’s father, an influential scholar, was a student of Abduh’s,
and Banna himself avidly read The Lighthouse as a young man, later
calling Rashid Rida one of the “greatest influences in the service of
Islam in Egypt.” 8 The relationship between Afghani, Abduh, and
Rashid Rida was seen by Banna as a kind of Blessed Trinity. Accord¬
ing to Mitchell: “Afghani was seen [by Banna] as the ‘caller’ or
‘announcer’ and Rida as the ‘archivist’ or ‘historian.’.. . Afghani sees
the problems and warns, Abduh teaches and thinks (‘a well-meaning
shaykh who inspired reforms in the Azhar’), and Rida writes and
records.” 9 The Lighthouse halted publication soon after the death of
Rashid Rida in 1935, but in 1939 Banna revived it in tribute to his
mentor. 10

The political program of the early Muslim Brotherhood was hardly
complex. Banna insisted that Muslims should return to the simple days
that prevailed during the era of the Prophet Muhammad and his
immediate successors, rejecting modern scholarly interpretations of

5 i • Devil’s Game

Islamic law and what he saw as the Westernized impurity of thought
that had started to beguile Muslims, especially youth. For Banna, the
Koran was enough. “Confronted by the Egyptian nationalists of the
[1920s]—who demanded independence, the departure of the British,
and a democratic constitution—the Brothers responded with a slogan
that is still current in the Islamist movement: ‘The Koran is our consti¬
tution.’” 11 Indeed, the Koran and the Sunna (the tradition associated
with the prophet’s way of life) were enough to guide society, and
Islamic law (sharia) could replace man-made, secular jurisprudence.
Yet Banna had a very weakly developed concept of an Islamic state,
whose elaboration would await his heirs: Sayyid Qutb, Pakistan’s
Abul-Ala Mawdudi, Khomeini, et al. According to Mitchell, for Banna:

The political structure of the Islamic state was to be bound by
three principles: (1) the Quran is the fundamental constitution; (2)
government operates on the concept of consultation ( shura ); (3)
the executive ruler is bound by the teachings of Islam and the will
of the people. 12

Islam, for Banna, was an all-encompassing, cultlike system of belief.
Referring to the Salafiyya, the back-to-the-basics purists, and the Sufis,
the mystical, Freemason-like movement within Islam, Banna described
his movement thus: “a Salafiyya message, a Sunni way, a Sufi truth, a
political organization, an athletic group, a cultural-educational union,
an economic company, and a social idea.” 13

In 1932, Banna moved to Cairo and established the Muslim Broth¬
erhood in the Egyptian capital. For the next twenty years, until the
revolution of 1952, the Brotherhood would serve as an anchor of the
Egyptian right, allied to the palace, to the right wing of the nationalist
Wafd Party, and to conservative officers in the Egyptian army. In
1933, Banna convened the organization’s first national conference,
which took place in Cairo. Soon afterward, youth clubs and athletic
associations tied to the Muslim Brotherhood began to form paramili¬
tary units, first called the Rovers in 1936. Explicitly organized along
the lines of European fascist movements, the Rovers (later called the
Battalions), 14 were a unique presence in Egypt: disciplined, menacing,

England’s Brothers • 5 3

and utterly devoted to Banna. In 1937, at the coronation of King
Farouq, the Brotherhood’s thugs were enlisted to provide “order and
security” for the king’s ceremony. 15

The Muslim Brotherhood’s chief rival between the wars was the
nationalist Delegation (Wafd) Party. Assembled from the ranks of the
pre-World War I anti-British political movement, the Wafd Party was
named for the “delegation” led by Saad Zaghlul, who attended the
postwar conferences at which the victorious imperialists decided the
future of the region, creating entire states and assigning them to vari¬
ous European capitals. The Wafd, as a coalition, had left-, center, and
right-wing components, and it variously aligned itself for or against
the monarchy and other Egyptian political forces over the years. The
Wafd left would eventually toy with an alliance with Egypt’s commu¬
nists, while the smaller right wing of the Wafd often maintained secret
relations with the Brotherhood.

For the next decade, Banna played a complex game of three-
dimensional chess in Egyptian politics. He enjoyed intimate relations
with the royal entourage around King Farouq, getting financial sup¬
port and political assistance and providing the king with intelligence
and shock troops against the left. “Certainly by the 1940s the Ikhwan
has an on-and-off close relationship with the palace, and a lot of
money was changing hands, and the British would be involved in
that,” says Joel Gordon, a Muslim Brotherhood expert. “Anything
the palace does is linked to the British.” 16 Banna also developed close
ties to two key Egyptian officials, Prime Minister Ali Mahir, an ardent
advocate of pan-Islamism, and General Aziz Ali Misri, the com¬
mander in chief of the Egyptian armed forces. Through various chan¬
nels, mostly secret, Banna was connected to the palace, sometimes
through the king’s personal physician, or through various government
officials or the army. He was consulted by the king on the appoint¬
ment of Egyptian prime ministers, and at least once received an offi¬
cial invitation to a royal banquet.

“The Society of the Brothers,” wrote Mitchell, “was obviously con¬
ceived of as an instrument against the Wafd and the communists.” 17
Right-wing Wafdists, primarily big landowners and capitalists, viewed

54 • Devil’s Game

the Muslim Brotherhood as an ally, while the mainstream Wafdists
considered the Brotherhood a reactionary force. 18

The Brotherhood’s Secret Apparatus

During World War II, the Muslim Brotherhood first established its
intelligence service and a secret, terrorist-inclined unit called the
Secret Apparatus. “The intelligence service gathered information at
military installations, foreign embassies, government offices, and so
on,” a 1950s analyst wrote. 19 This clandestine unit is what gave the
Brotherhood its well-deserved reputation for violence. Created in
1942, over the next twelve years (until it was smashed by Nasser), it
would assassinate judges, police officers, and government officials,
burn and ransack Egyptian Jewish businesses, and engage in goon-
squad attacks on labor unions and communists. Throughout this
period, the Brotherhood operated mostly in alliance with the Egyp¬
tian king, using its paramilitary force on his behalf and against his
political enemies. As the king began to lose his grip, the Muslim
Brotherhood distanced itself from Farouq while maintaining shadowy
ties to the army and to foreign intelligence agencies—and always
opposed to the left. According to Mitchell, the Apparatus operated
precisely the way an Egyptian intelligence unit would: “In 1944 the
secret apparatus also began to infiltrate the communist movement,
which during the war had taken on new life and which the Muslim
Brothers considered to be one of their principal enemies.” 20

Without doubt, the vast majority of the membership of the Mus¬
lim Brotherhood was zealously dedicated to the creation of a right-
wing Islamic government, and they were militantly opposed to
imperialism. Yet the leadership of the Brotherhood played politics at
the highest level, collaborating with the palace, the secular political
parties, the army, and the imperial powers. Whether the Muslim
Brotherhood’s leaders were indeed true believers who decided to
make their own temporary deals with the world’s Great Satans, or
whether they were cynical politicians and even outright agents of for¬
eign powers, is not known for certain. But there seems little doubt

England’s Brothers • 5 5

that while some leaders of the organization were sincere, others were
double-dealers and agents.

The Brotherhood existed in a kind of political netherworld. Its
overt branch, and its political stars—above all, Banna himself—
hobnobbed with kings and generals, while its covert branch engaged
in espionage and assassinations. As long as the Brotherhood’s vio¬
lence was aimed at the enemies of the king and the British, it managed
to operate with impunity. When it crossed the line, as it did from time
to time, the government would crack down on it or ban it temporar¬
ily. At other times, when it was either useful to the palace or to the
army, or when it was simply too powerful, it was tolerated and even
supported by the regime. Throughout its entire existence, too, the
Muslim Brotherhood had an ace-in-the-hole, namely, the political
support and money it received from the Saudi royal family and the
Wahhabi establishment.

The Muslim Brotherhood was organized into cells, or “families,”
groups of five to seven members who “underwent indoctrination
and systematic, sometimes extended military training in the various
branches of guerrilla warfare to qualify as ‘active brothers.’ When the
training was completed, they were instructed to pretend that they had
given up their membership in the Brotherhood and to join some other
organization active in religious affairs or sports.” 21

The British, with two centuries of deep involvement in religious
and tribal politics, were well aware of the power of Islamism. A British
intelligence officer tied to the king recognized the power of the Islamic
revival at the end of World War II. Ml6’s David “Archie” Boyle was liai¬
son to Farouq’s chef de cabinet Hassenein Pasha, a British intelligence
asset. Boyle “sensed the ‘murmuring resurgence of Moslem renais¬
sance, which as in 1919 was again in 1946 commencing to affect the
Middle Eastern countries as a whole. This time it was to be coupled
with the race for oil.’” 22 The British embassy, and later the U.S.
embassy in Cairo, had regular contact with Banna’s Brotherhood.

After World War II, the faltering Farouq regime lashed out against
the left, in an intense campaign of repression aimed at the commu¬
nists. The Cold War was beginning. Prime Minister Ismail Sidqi of
Egypt, who was installed as head of the government with the support

5 6 • Devil’s Game

of Banna, openly funded the Muslim Brotherhood, and provided
training camps for its shock troops. Its sweeping anti-left campaign
was enthusiastically backed by the Brothers:

In this campaign the Muslim Brotherhood, bitterly antagonistic to
the communists, could join wholeheartedly. Their press reported
the course of the governmental campaign in a daily column entitled,
‘The Fight Against Communism.’ The ‘intelligence’ of the Society
passed on information useful to the government in its continual
round-ups of real and suspected communists, especially in labour
and university circles. 23

In addition, the Brothers organized right-wing trade unions, under¬
mined strike actions, and bitterly opposed the Wafd nationalists
(often secretly in conjunction with the Wafd’s right). Concludes
Mitchell: “For the moment, the palace, the conservative heads of gov¬
ernment, and the Muslim Brotherhood shared common foes: commu¬
nism and the Wafd.” 24

Anwar Sadat, the future Egyptian president, was a key member of
the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1940s. During World War II he was
associated with a loosely organized movement of junior officers that,
in 1949, was formally established by Nasser as the Egyptian Free
Officers in the wake of the Palestine war and who seized power from
the king in 1952. The Free Officers included men from a wide variety
of ideologies, from communists and left-wing nationalists to Wafdists
and members of the Muslim Brotherhood, all united in their belief
that Farouq was hopelessly corrupt and servile. England’s imperious
treatment of Farouq during the war by British ambassador Miles
Lampson—who reportedly 25 called the young Farouq “boy” to his
face—had enraged them, and they maintained contact with one another
in the postwar years.

Sadat, a right-wing member of Nasser’s Free Officers movement,
was the liaison between the dissident military officers and Banna, and
during the war Sadat conducted regular tete-a-tetes with the Brother¬
hood founder. In his autobiography. In Search of Identity, Sadat pro¬
vided a detailed account of his relationship to Banna. 26 Sadat warmly
praises Banna: “His understanding of religion [was] profound, and his

England’s Brothers • 57

delivery impressive. He was indeed qualified, from all points of view, to
be a religious leader. Besides, he was a true Egyptian: good-humored,
decent, and tolerant.... I was struck by the perfect organization of the
Muslim Brotherhood, and by the respect, even extraordinary reverence,
which the Supreme Guide commanded.” 27 In 1945 Sadat tried to
arrange a meeting between Banna and King Farouq, through Yusuf
Rashad, a contact of Sadat’s and the king’s personal physician. That
meeting didn’t happen, but in a frank discussion between Sadat and
Banna, they agreed to cooperate in building the Free Officers, and
Banna started recruiting military officers for the group. 28

But was Banna recruiting members for the Free Officers—or infil¬
trating it? It isn’t clear. The Brotherhood was more than a movement.
It was a cult, it was a revivalist party, it was an intelligence operation,
it was a paramilitary unit, and it was an international organization
that was rapidly building branches in many Middle East countries.
What is clear is that during the 1940s, the British, the Nazis, and the
Soviets had thoroughly penetrated the Brotherhood. In the 1930s,
many right-wing Arab nationalists and many on the Islamic right,
including the Brotherhood, found succor and support in ties to Ger¬
man Nazi intelligence. According to Miles Copeland, a legendary
Central Intelligence Agency operative who spent years in Egypt, dur¬
ing World War II Banna’s organization “had been virtually a German
Intelligence unit.” 29 In saying so, Copeland no doubt exaggerates,
perhaps willfully, though countless Islamists had Nazi affiliations in
the 1930s and 1940s. After World War II, many of the Nazi-linked
Islamists migrated back to British, and then into Anglo-American cir¬
cles, sometimes with generous financial inducements. In the 1950s,
when Nasser arrested the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, his
security services found out how tangled were the organization’s ties.
“Sound beatings of Muslim Brotherhood organizers who had been
arrested revealed that the organization had been thoroughly pene¬
trated, at the top, by British, American, French, and Soviet intelli¬
gence services, any one of which could either make active use of it or
blow it up, whichever best suited its purpose,” wrote Copeland. 30

As it became ever more clear to London and Washington that Farouq
could not survive, the search for an alternative regime developed. The

58 • Devil’s Game

main options were first, the combination of the Wafd and the commu¬
nists; and second, the secretive alliance between the Muslim Brother¬
hood and the military officers. Neither the British nor the Americans
wanted the Wafd-communist option; the British seemed insistent on
propping up the monarchy, while the Americans opted for supporting
Nasser’s Free Officers. The Brotherhood, with ties to both the monar¬
chy and the Free Officers, played a double game.

The Wafd Party itself was divided into competing factions and
plagued by corruption. Yet an important section of the Wafd sought an
alliance with the left and the communists, which worried the palace, the
British—and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brothers worked hard to
destroy any possibility of a Wafd-communist axis, and the Wafd struck
back at the Brotherhood, portraying Banna’s thugs as being in the pay of
the British and the pro-British prime minister, Ismail Sidqi. The commu¬
nists and the Wafd accused the Muslim Brotherhood of being “tools of
the imperialists.” The Wafd charged that “phalanxes of the Muslim
Brothers” were carrying out “acts of fascist terror.” It called for disso¬
lution of the Brotherhood’s (government-funded) paramilitary units,
and it documented numerous instances of strike-breaking by Muslim
Brotherhood goons. 31 But the Brotherhood would gain strength from
an unexpected direction in 1948: the war in Palestine.

Banna and the Mufti

The Arab-Jewish war strengthened the Muslim Brotherhood immensely.
It was a chaotic moment in the Middle East, as a new Jewish nation
established itself on part of the territory of British-occupied Palestine.
The war, the defeat of Arab armies by paramilitary Jewish units, and
the creation of Israel forever changed the dynamic of politics in the
Middle East, and it spurred political Islam in several ways. First, the
Brotherhood created paramilitary units during the war itself, forces
that won official backing from Arab states—and, like the Afghan jihad
of the 1980s, created legions of battle-hardened Islamist veterans.
Second, the Arab defeat discredited the Arab regimes, including the
monarchies. It created space for new political forces such as the

England’s Brothers • 59

Muslim Brotherhood, and the fledgling Islamists took full advantage
of the propaganda value that attached to the loss of Palestine. And
third, the Islamists generated political capital by raising the alarm
over the Jewish threat to Jerusalem and its Islamic holy places and
used that threat as a rallying cry.

The war also bolstered ties between the Brotherhood and another
key British-sponsored Muslim operative, the conspiratorial, Nazi-
leaning mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. Their connection
went back more than a decade. Haj Amin had his first recorded
encounter with the Muslim Brotherhood as far back as 1935, when
he met Banna’s brother, Abdel-Rahman al-Banna, who’d helped
Banna found the group and who headed its Secret Apparatus. 32 Like
Banna, Haj Amin played an immensely important role in founding the
twentieth-century Islamic fundamentalist political movement.

The creation of Israel spurred more than Islamism, of course, pro¬
viding fodder for Arab nationalists, such as Nasser, who wanted to rid
the Arab world of its fraternity of dissolute kings. For nationalists,
Israel was a symbol of Arab weakness and semi-colonial subjugation,
overseen by proxy kings in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. But
Banna and the Brothers argued that the Arab nationalists were
wrong, that no solution could be found in secular nationalism and
nation building, and certainly not in Westernization. The only way to
restore the former glory of the Islamic world was to return to funda¬
mentalist Islam, they proclaimed.

A multidimensional struggle was developing that would decide the
future of the Middle East. The Islamists were just one of many forces
competing against one another: There were the nationalists, the left
(including the growing Arab communist parties), the secular intellec¬
tuals, and the urban working class; there were the wealthy merchants
and businessmen engaged in international trade and commerce; there
were traditional elites, tribal leaders, and aristocratic landowners;
and last, there were the monarchies and their armies. The burgeoning
Islamists were a kind of wild card: Bitterly opposed to the nationalists
and the left, they maintained ties to the traditional elites and had the
support of many merchants, and they also had covert alliances with
army officers and royals. For the British, and the Johnny-come-lately

6o • Devil’s Game

Americans, it was hard to know where to place one’s bets. The Pales¬
tine war had vastly complicated the Anglo-American calculations, since
both the left-nationalist forces and the Islamists blamed “the West”
for the Israeli debacle.

The Brotherhood grew by leaps and bounds in the late 1940s.
Banna’s son-in-law, Said Ramadan, helped organize chapters in Pales¬
tine and Transjordan. Under cover of arming themselves for war with
the Zionists, the Brothers collected and stored stockpiles of weapons,
often supplied by members of the Secret Apparatus who had ties to
the Egyptian army. And the Banna-Haj Amin alliance, forged in the
crucible of the Palestine war, helped the Brothers extend their reach into
Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine.

To say Haj Amin al-Husseini had a checkered career is an under¬
statement. His paranoid worldview, centered on fierce hatred of Jews,
and his open support for Hitler make him an object of scorn by histo¬
rians. But from the beginning Haj Amin was a British creation. He
exercised a spell over generations of British spooks, including Freya
Stark, a legendary British intelligence operative who described Haj
Amin in almost reverential terms: “The Mufti sat there all in white,
spotless and voluminous, a man in his early forties, wearing his tur¬
ban like a halo. His eyes were light blue and shining, with a sort of
radiance, as of a just fallen Lucifer.” 33

Haj Amin’s career began modestly, to say the least. A scion of an
important Arab Palestinian family, he studied at Egypt’s A 1 Azhar
Islamic university, but didn’t do well and failed to finish. After World
War I, he took a job with the Reuters news agency in Jerusalem, as a
translator. Gradually, he immersed himself in Palestinian politics, but
he showed a flair both for violence and for fanatical, anti-Jewish con¬
spiracy theories, among them the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He
was arrested for his role in anti-Jewish riots, but in 1920, Sir Herbert
Samuel, the British High Commissioner for Palestine (and a Jew),
singled him out for a dramatic special pardon, and then “engineered
his spectacular rise to power.” 34 Though Haj Amin’s credentials as an
Islamic scholar were nil. Sir Ronald Storrs, the governor of Jerusalem,
rigged an election on his behalf and then appointed Haj Amin as

England’s Brothers • 61

Jerusalem’s mufti. According to the Political Dictionary of the Middle
East in the 20th Century, a mufti is a

Muslim religious official who issues rulings (fatwa), in general
in response to questions. In most Islamic countries the mufti is
government-appointed. A mufti has a highly respected status and
great spiritual and social influence, but plays no executive or polit¬
ical role. An exception to this was the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin
al-Husseini (appointed 1921, dismissed 1937), who exploited his
position to consolidate his political leadership. 35

A year later, Herbert Samuel established the Supreme Muslim Coun¬
cil, which assumed control of Palestine’s rich religious endowments,
and named Haj Amin president. The two posts gave the erratic Mus¬
lim demagogue enormous political power. 36

Parallel with the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood, in
1931 Haj Amin convened an Islamic Congress in Jerusalem and trav¬
eled to India, Iran, Afghanistan, and other Muslim countries, raising
funds and building support. He enjoyed a modicum of British support
and protection even as he veered into a political alliance with Ger¬
many; when sixty Arab militants were arrested in Palestine in 1936
during an anti-British rebellion, Haj Amin—who’d taken part in the
revolt—went free. 37 Eventually, his Nazi sympathies forced him to flee,
first to Lebanon, then to Iraq, then to Iran, and finally—after pledging
Adolf Hitler his “loyal collaboration in all spheres” 38 —to Berlin. In
Germany, Haj Amin oversaw Axis propaganda broadcasts into the
Middle East, directed a network of espionage agents, and organized
all-Muslim units of the Nazi SS, made up mainly of Bosnians.

With the collapse of the Third Reich, however, the mufti quietly
left Germany via Switzerland, settling in France, where the Allies
refused to arrest or detain him. The British, in particular, declined to
seek his extradition, and Great Britain’s undersecretary for foreign
affairs made a point of saying: “The mufti is not a war criminal.” 39 In
1946, Haj Amin al-Husseini arrived in triumph in Egypt, where he
was welcomed as a guest of the king. “The new shrine of political
Islam is the mufti’s house. Villa Aida, near Roushdy Pasha Station of

6 z • Devil’s Game

the street car line that runs out from Alexandria to the suburb of
Ramleh,” a New York Times report in August 1946 proclaimed.
“There is an Egyptian soldier about every eight or ten yards around
the garden, and the mufti has private bodyguards inside.” 40 Another
report said that the mufti’s political work was “lavishly financed” by
Saudi Arabia’s King Abdel Aziz and Egypt’s King Farouq. 41

Apparently, the British didn’t hold a grudge against the mufti,
because they soon hired him as a propagandist. In Cairo, British intelli¬
gence had established the Arab News Agency and the Near East Broad¬
casting Station (NEABS), whose “first director was Squadron-Leader
Alfred Marsack, a devout Muslim who had served in the Middle East
before the war and who had devoted the best part of his life to Arab
affairs, and had even converted to Islam.” 42 Perhaps impressed by his
experience as a Nazi broadcaster, the MI6 outlet hired Haj Amin. The
man who oversaw NEABS, through MI6’s Near East Association, was
Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, an aristocratic British banker who’d headed
the Arab Bureau, the Cairo headquarters of British intelligence during
World War I and T. E. Lawrence’s base of operations. 43

In 1946, the mufti and the Muslim Brotherhood jointly organized
a paramilitary force in Palestine called the Rescuers, with up to
10,000 men under arms. 44 The Rescuers were either tolerated or
ignored by the British authorities. In Egypt, meanwhile, Banna and
the mufti established a working relationship. One of the Muslim
Brotherhood’s military units, stationed in Gaza, was put under the
command of a Sudanese aide to the mufti. 45 And in Cairo, Hassan al-
Banna backed Haj Amin as the head of a new Palestine government.
Perhaps the high point of the mufti’s career came with his triumphant
return to Gaza in September 1947, where he proclaimed the state of
Palestine and himself as “President of the Republic.” 46 With the Arab
defeat by Jewish forces, however, Haj Amin’s fledgling state was no
more. But Haj Amin would survive, prosper, and return to battle in
the 1950s.

Banna, meanwhile, was nearing the end of his fiery lifetime. The
regime of King Farouq was on its last legs, and the political vultures
were circling. The 1948 Palestine crisis fatally undermined Farouq’s
regime, making it difficult for any of Egypt’s political forces to ally

England’s Brothers ■ 63

with the king. An economic crisis, too, engulfed the country, accom¬
panied by riots, demonstrations, strikes, and growing violence. The
accord between the Muslim Brotherhood and the palace broke down,
and both nationalists and Islamists sought political advantage by
blaming the corrupt and feckless regime of King Farouq for the Pales¬
tine defeat. Finally, in December 1948, the Egyptian government out¬
lawed the Muslim Brotherhood, and weeks later, a Brotherhood
assassin murdered Prime Minister Mahmud Fahmi Nuqrashi.

Two months later, in January 1949, Banna’s career came to a sud¬
den end. Hassan al-Banna was assassinated, shot to death on the
streets outside the Young Men’s Muslim Association headquarters in
Cairo, apparently by Egyptian security officers. 47

Banna’s death provided an exclamation point for the end of the
first era of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the beginning of another. In
the wake of Banna’s death, various factions of the Muslim Brother¬
hood competed for control, and the party itself drifted in and out of
legality, first banned and then tolerated. The new supreme guide, suc¬
ceeding Banna, was Hassan Ismail al-Hudaybi, an Egyptian judge
whose brother was chief of Farouq’s royal household, and whose
appointment was engineered by a wealthy landowner in Upper Egypt.
(Fifty years later, Hudaybi’s son would also serve as the Muslim
Brotherhood’s supreme guide.) The Brotherhood’s factions would
each maintain ties to parts of the Egyptian body politic, keeping lines
open to the palace, infiltrating the army and the police, and establish¬
ing covert contacts with the burgeoning movement of Free Officers
who, in 1952, would seize control of Egypt.

Despite the factional divisions, however, it was clear that the Mus¬
lim Brotherhood would outlast Banna. Thanks to Said Ramadan, the
Brothers were extending their range and influence worldwide, and in
Egypt they remained a potent force with hundreds of thousands of
adherents. Money from Saudi Arabia helped sustain the movement
when other Arab governments, especially Egypt’s, moved against
them. And thanks to the Cold War, the Muslim Brotherhood would
draw energy from the global crusade against communism. Its combina¬
tion of elite insider politics and underground violent militancy marked
the true start of what we now call “political Islam.” The Islamist

64 * Devil’s Game

regimes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and Sudan that came to power
beginning in the late 1970s were the direct result of the groundbreak¬
ing work done by Banna, Ramadan, and their allies.

Amid the wreckage of World War II, the United States would make
its first, tentative steps into the Middle East. The vast area stretching
from Greece and Turkey through Pakistan and India was fated to
become a major battleground during the Cold War. What set the
Middle East apart from other arenas for the East-West struggle was
its proximity to the USSR and the fact that two-thirds of the world’s
oil was concentrated in a tiny area surrounding the Persian Gulf.
The strategists who built the NATO, Baghdad Pact, and CENTO
alliances, the Rapid Deployment Force, and the U.S. Central Com¬
mand attached extraordinary importance to securing the Gulf. Unfor¬
tunately, those same strategists confused the alleged threat from the
Soviet Union with the homegrown forces of Arab and Persian nation¬
alism, who saw the region’s oil as part of their national patrimony. To
defeat the nationalists, and to build a tier of nations aligned in opposi¬
tion to the Soviet Union, the United States would reach out to the
Islamic right.

The Muslim Brotherhood was waiting.

ISLAM MEETS THE COLD WAR

I first met Hassan al-Banna in Saudi Arabia,” recalls Hermann
Eilts, then a young American diplomat in Jeddah, who says that he
knew Banna reasonably well. “He used to come to Saudi Arabia for
money, actually,” he says. “I met him at the home of the then-Saudi
deputy minister of finance, who was a man who was himself very
pious and who handled Banna. His name was Shaikh Mohammed
Sorour [Sabhan], who was a slave who had been manumitted, and it
was Sorour who handled most of the major financial matters with the
Muslim Brotherhood. He was a black, and he was from Sudan.” 1

It was 1948, just a few months before Banna was assassinated in
Cairo. Eilts would often see Banna in Sorour’s home. “He was a fre¬
quent visitor, because Saudi Arabia was his principal source of financ¬
ing,” Eilts remembers. Since its founding twenty years earlier, the
Brotherhood had become a powerful, even frightening force in Egypt,
with a secret paramilitary arm that sponsored terrorism, infiltrated
the Egyptian army and intelligence services, and intimidated its politi¬
cal opponents. “I found him to be very, very friendly,” says the former
U.S. diplomat, who would become one of America’s leading Arabists
and ambassador to Egypt and Saudi Arabia. “There was no hesitation
in meeting Westerners.”

66 • Devil’s Game

Eilts didn’t discuss Banna’s movement with him, but U.S. political
officers in Cairo in the 1940s did so on a routine basis. “I know that
some of my colleagues at the American embassy in Cairo had regular
meetings with Hassan al-Banna at the time, and found him perfectly
empathetic,” he says. “We kept in touch with them especially for report¬
ing purposes, because at that time the Muslim Brotherhood was one ele¬
ment that was viewed as potentially politically important, so you kept
contact with them. I don’t think we were alarmed by them, though there
was concern when the Brotherhood’s Secret Apparatus assassinated the
prime minister [of Egypt]. We were concerned about stability, primarily,
and our judgment was that these assassinations were worrying but that
they did not forecast serious political instability.”

It’s not surprising that U.S. diplomats in Egypt and Saudi Arabia in
the 1940s would maintain regular contact with the Muslim Brother¬
hood, despite its violence-prone nature and fascist orientation. The
regime of Egypt’s King Farouq was on its last legs, and it wasn’t clear
what might replace it. According to Said Aburish: “The growing
Muslim Brotherhood, which by then had 1.5 million members, repre¬
sented the only potential challenge to the ruling establishment.” 2 Yet
many early U.S. representatives in the region were attracted by its mil¬
itant anti-communist outlook.

The Brotherhood, the broader community of the Islamic right, and
the underlying institutions of traditional Islam in the region stood at
the center of a swirling debate in Washington: Was Islam a bulwark
against godless communism? Or was organized Islam a backward¬
looking, ultra-conservative force whose inherent anti-Western outlook
made it receptive to the class-warfare politics of the left? Could the
United States help shape Islamic institutions that could be the back¬
bone of a new civil society in the Middle East, or did America’s inter¬
est lie in allying itself with the region’s secular modernizers?

The United States was just beginning to feel its way around the
Middle East. Few American officials had any experience in the region,
U.S. universities were abysmally weak on Middle East studies, and
despite its leading role in winning World War II the U.S. military had
virtually no significant presence in either North Africa or the Persian
Gulf. The fledgling Central Intelligence Agency, which was gobbling

Islam Meets the Cold War • 67

up Ivy League graduates and virtually anyone who could speak Ara¬
bic, was inexperienced at best. From its founding in 1947 until at least
the 1950s, the CIA took a backseat to British intelligence.

“Our attitude,” according to Miles Copeland, a CIA officer who
served in the region in those years, “was one of let’s-wait-until-we-
know-what-we’re-doing. ” 3

The Middle East was British turf, and the British were exceedingly
turf conscious. Egypt, Iraq, and Iran, though nominally independent,
were under de facto British suzerainty. Palestine and Transjordan
were officially British mandates. The states that make up Kuwait and
the other Gulf sheikhdoms were British colonies, as were India and
Pakistan. Yet the British hold on the region, and on its oil, was erod¬
ing, and America’s post-World War II engagement in the Middle East
was growing fast. It began with Saudi Arabia, the country that would
be the entry point and anchor for the American presence in the region.
But that country’s policy of supporting and financing the Muslim
Brotherhood would forever entangle the United States with funda¬
mentalist Islam. The U.S. connection with Saudi Arabia and the Mid¬
dle East was spurred by the desire for oil and the logic of Cold War
containment. Yet U.S. inexperience in the region, and its near-total
lack of understanding of the region’s culture, including Islam, bedev¬
iled American policy from the start.

According to standard histories, the official U.S. entry into the
region is said to have begun in 1945, on a yacht anchored in the Great
Bitter Lake astride the Suez Canal. There, in February, on his journey
back to Washington from Yalta, Franklin Delano Roosevelt met King
Abdel Aziz ibn Saud, the first meeting between an American president
and a Saudi monarch, setting the stage for a half century of relations
between the two countries.

But two other crucial events preceded the FDR-Ibn Saud encounter.

First came the signing, in 1933, of the U.S. oil concession in Saudi
Arabia that would grow into that global petroleum superpower, the
Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco). And the man who bro¬
kered that all-important deal was the British spook, Harry St. John
Bridger (“Abdullah”) Philby, the operative who had helped Ibn Saud
and his Wahhabi Brotherhood take power during and after World

68 • Devil’s Game

War I. In the late 1920s, Philby, trading on his Saudi connections, left
official government employ and went into business for himself.
Increasingly tied to the A 1 Saud, Philby distanced himself—at least
publicly—from British policy. To the bemusement of his friends and
the consternation of his wife and family, he converted to Islam, taking
the name “Abdullah.” His conversion, however, was a lark—or a
subterfuge. In his diary, he wrote jocularly “how nice it would be for
me when I became a Muslim and could have four wives.” 4 Having
been an atheist since Cambridge, it was clear that Abdullah Philby
“needed Islam not as a faith but as a convenience,” and he told friends
exactly that. 5 Yet he plunged into Islam, visiting Mecca, taking multiple
wives, and marrying a slave girl who was a gift from Ibn Saud. His real
interest, however, was making money, and in Jeddah it was said that
Philby “should be called not Abdullah, slave of God, but Abd al-Qirsh,
slave of halfpence.” 6 The born-again wheeler-dealer ran businesses,
becoming Ford Motor’s official representative in Saudi Arabia (though
he said: “I hate the sight and sound of motor cars”). 7 Eventually he
became an agent for Standard Oil of California (Socal) and, using his
friendship with the king, Philby sealed the deal for Socal’s entry into
what would become its ultimate El Dorado, achieved at a bargain price:
£50,000 ($250,000) down and annual rent of just £5,000 in gold. The
concession was to last sixty years and cover 360,000 square miles, half
again as large as all of Texas. 8 For a pittance, the king had signed away
his country’s richest treasure. And the United States, represented by
Standard Oil of California—eventually joined by Texaco, then Exxon
and Mobil, the four Aramco partners—was in. 9

FDR’s proclamation, in 1943, that Saudi Arabia would henceforth
fall under the U.S. defense umbrella was the second crucial develop¬
ment. “I hereby find that the defense of Saudi Arabia is vital to the
defense of the United States,” 10 the president announced.

Roosevelt’s embrace of Saudi Arabia had multiple aims. There was
the obvious one, namely, that its oil was a precious resource. There was
a strategic one, in which the threat (remote though it was) of Soviet
encirclement of the Persian Gulf was a concern. And there was a tacti¬
cal one, aimed at America’s allies, especially the British. Although Lon-

Islam Meets the Cold War ■ 69

don was dominant in the region, including southern Persia and Iraq,
there was a sometimes bitter rivalry between the United States and the
British—and to a lesser extent, France and Italy, too—over oil in the
Middle East. All jealously guarded their companies’ advantages.

Four years before his shipboard encounter with the king, FDR had
seemed willing to let Saudi Arabia be handled by Great Britain, since
London was virtually all-powerful in the region, and the United States
had little experience there. “Will you tell the British I hope they can
take care of the king of Saudi Arabia?” FDR asked an aide. “This is a
little far afield for us.” 11 But Standard Oil of California and the Texas
Oil Company, partners in what would soon be renamed Aramco,
would have none of it. They convinced Interior Secretary Harold
Ickes, FDR’s right-hand man, and then FDR himself, that the United
States must stand up to the British, who, they said, were “trying to
edge their way into” Saudi Arabia. 12 In the midst of World War II, the
two allies eventually struck a deal, carving up the region’s oil.
Roosevelt told Lord Halifax, the British ambassador, “Persian oil. ..
is yours. We share the oil of Kuwait and Iraq. As for Saudi Arabian
oil, it’s ours.” 13

To Winston Churchill, FDR cabled: “Please do accept my assur¬
ances that we are not making sheep’s eyes at your oil fields in Iraq and
Iran.” Replied Churchill, who’d almost single-handedly built Lon¬
don’s overseas oil empire, “Let me reciprocate by giving you the
fullest assurance that we have no thought of trying to horn in on your
interests or property in Saudi Arabia.” 14 (Both men, of course, were
lying. The British had long coveted Saudi oil, and the United States
would soon elbow its way forcefully into the oil concessions in Iran
and Iraq.)

FDR’s meeting with Ibn Saud did mark a consummation of the
U.S.-Saudi partnership. To transport the king, who’d never been out¬
side of Arabia before, the United States bundled him onto the U.S.S.
Murphy, complete with family, retainers, servants, and sheep for
slaughter, and the desert potentate set up a tent on deck for sleeping.
Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s son, described FDR’s encounter with
Ibn Saud, as the king was known, aboard the Quincy:

70 • Devil’s Game

Discreetly, my sister Anna had taken her leave of Father that day
for a trip to Cairo, out of deference for the Moslem custom of
secluding the women of the family. . . . Father ended up by prom¬
ising Ibn Saud that he would sanction no American move hos¬
tile to the Arab people. . . . And Ibn Saud, looking enviously at
Father’s wheelchair, was surprised when Father promptly made
him a present of it . 15

Actually, it was a spare wheelchair, and it was too small for the bulky
monarch. But it was enough for the Saudi king to declare himself
FDR’s “twin,” and it symbolized the formal beginning of the U.S.-
Saudi alliance. C. L. Sulzberger, writing in the New York Times, was
excited at the prospect of the United States getting its hands on Saudi
oil: “The immense oil deposits in Saudi Arabia alone make that coun¬
try more important to American diplomacy than almost any other
smaller nation,” he wrote. 16 Roosevelt, too, it is clear, cared a lot
about oil, and not much about Islam.

FDR’s 1943 proclamation that America would defend Saudi Ara¬
bia would be reaffirmed by every American president, most promi¬
nently in the 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine and the 1980 Carter
Doctrine. In 1944, the United States sent its first military mission to
Saudi Arabia, and in 1945 the United States and Saudi Arabia signed
a military cooperation agreement that established a major U.S. Air
Force base at Dhahran in the Persian Gulf, a facility that would serve
as an American base until the 1960s. That agreement was quickly fol¬
lowed by a 1949 accord, which provided for a U.S. survey team to
cover the entire Arabian peninsula, with recommendations for creat¬
ing a U.S.-equipped, 43,000-man army and air force, and a 1951
accord setting up a permanent U.S. Military Training Mission in the
country. 17

From the beginning, America’s relationship with Saudi Arabia was
a no-nonsense one, involving a rapidly expanding oil output, bilateral
defense arrangements, and a vast influx of Texans, Oklahomans, and
Louisianans into the kingdom. The United States, joined by Great
Britain as a rival and junior partner, began to surround Saudi Arabia

Islam Meets the Cold War • 7:

with military alliances. In 1951, the United States and Britain pro¬
posed a “Middle East Command,” linking the United States, the
United Kingdom, and France with Turkey, Israel, and Jordan. They
began by approaching Egypt, but abandoned the idea when Egypt’s
king, pressed by nationalists and deeply unhappy about the new Jew¬
ish state, politely declined. Next, the British took the lead in signing
treaties with Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan, calling the new constel¬
lation the “Baghdad Pact.” The United States, which was building its
own ties to those states and was simultaneously intent on elbowing the
British out of the oil-rich Persian Gulf, didn’t join the Baghdad Pact,
and an astute U.S. observer of the time, writing for the Council on For¬
eign Relations, rather snidely noted that the British had assembled the
pact “in order to save its position in Iraq and to bolster a flagging
influence throughout the Middle East.” 18 The Baghdad Pact, too, soon
fell part when Baghdad, its center, underwent a revolution in 1958.
The British-installed king of Iraq was toppled and executed by an
alliance of army nationalists and the Iraqi Communist Party, and the
Baghdad Pact was no more. It was replaced by the Central Treaty
Organization, linking the United States, the United Kingdom, Turkey,
Iran, and Pakistan. Pakistan was also linked to the West by its mem¬
bership in the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization.

The Anglo-American alliances in the Middle East rested on the tra¬
ditional levers of external influence—military power, economic muscle,
and diplomacy. More quietly, though, as the Cold War evolved, an
additional factor emerged to bolster the U.S. and U.K. presence,
namely, the religious and cultural power of political Islam. Especially
important in that regard was Saudi Arabia’s would-be role as Islam’s
Vatican. As Saudi Arabia emerged as America’s counterweight to
Egypt, Nasser, and nationalism, a number of Muslim Brotherhood
organizers emerged as emissaries for the Islamic right across the
region—none, perhaps, more important than Said Ramadan.

Ramadan, a key Brotherhood ideologue, served as Saudi Arabia’s
unofficial ambassador of Islamism. As the Muslim Brotherhood
struggled to maintain its presence in Egypt, where it was increasingly
at odds with the new regime under Nasser, Saudi Arabia not only

72. • D e

l ’ s Game

bankrolled the Brothers but offered its territory as a safe haven. A
series of Saudi kings were preoccupied with the threat of communism,
and they saw the Muslim Brotherhood and others on the Islamic right
as the leading edge of the anti-communist movement. Equally impor¬
tant, perhaps, Saudi Arabia saw Egypt’s Nasser as a dire threat, since
Nasser—ruling impoverished Egypt—coveted Saudi Arabia’s oil. So
for reasons of both anti-communism and anti-Arab nationalism,
Saudi Arabia encouraged the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood in
Egypt and throughout the Middle East.

Ramadan at the White House

In the late summer of 1953, the Oval Office at the White House
served as the stage for a little-noticed encounter between President
Dwight D. Eisenhower and a young Middle Eastern firebrand. In the
muted black-and-white photograph 19 recording the event, the grand-
fatherly, balding Ike, then sixty-three, stands gray suited, erect, his
elbows bent and his fists clenched as if to add muscle to some forceful
point. To his left is a young, olive-skinned Egyptian in a dark suit,
with a neatly trimmed, full beard and closely cropped hair, clutching a
sheaf of papers behind his back. Staring intently at the president, he is
just twenty-seven years old, but already has more than a decade of
experience at the very heart of the Islamic world’s violent and pas¬
sionate politics. Alongside him, some dressed in Western attire and
others wearing robes, shawls, and Muslim headgear, are members of a
delegation of scholars, mullahs, and activists from India, Syria,
Yemen, and North Africa.

The president’s visitor that September day was Said Ramadan, a
militant official and ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood. The
young man even had a claim to semi-royalty in Brotherhood circles,
since he had married Wafa al-Banna, Hassan al-Banna’s daughter,
making him the son-in-law of the organization’s founder. As he stood
at the president’s side, Ramadan appeared respectable and harmless.
Yet the Brotherhood was known throughout the Middle East, since at
least the late 1940s, as an organization of fanatics and terrorists. Its

Islam Meets the Cold War • 73

acolytes had murdered several Egyptian officials, including a prime
minister, and just five years before Ramadan met Ike, the Muslim
Brotherhood was declared illegal by the faltering regime of King
Farouq of Egypt. But it didn’t disappear. Over the next fifty years, the
Muslim Brotherhood would stage repeated comebacks, slowly build¬
ing its power and influence, spreading its ideology and building chap¬
ters in Jordan, Syria, Kuwait, and beyond. And until his death, in
Switzerland, in 1995, Said Ramadan would be its chief international
organizer.

Despite the fact that Ramadan was angry, violence prone, and
openly intent on remaking the Middle East according to Islamic fun¬
damentalist specifications, he wasn’t regarded as a threat. In fact,
based on a secret evaluation by the U.S. ambassador in Cairo,
Ramadan was viewed as a potential ally. It was the very height of
McCarthyism and the Cold War, and the Muslim Brotherhood was
bitterly anti-communist. Not only that, but Ramadan’s allies in the
Muslim Brotherhood, Pakistan’s Islamic Group, 20 and similar organi¬
zations across the region were vigorously opposed to Marxists, left-
wing activists on campuses, trade union organizers, Arab nationalists,
“Arab socialists,” the Baath Party, and secularists of all kinds. In the
latter category were pesky upstarts like Egypt’s president Gamal
Abdel Nasser, whose loyalty to the American side in the Cold War
was in doubt even in 1953, just a year after his Free Officers move¬
ment had ousted the corrupt and despised monarchy.

Said Ramadan was born in 19Z6 at Shibin el Kom, a village about
seventy miles north of Cairo in the Egyptian Nile Delta. 21 As a young
teenager, he encountered Hassan al-Banna and he joined the move¬
ment immediately. After graduating from Cairo University, in 1946
Ramadan became Banna’s personal secretary and right-hand man. A
year later, Ramadan was named editor of Al Shihab, the Muslim
Brotherhood weekly.

Besides helping the Brotherhood’s leader with organizational tasks,
the founder’s son-in-law became a roving ambassador for the Muslim
Brotherhood, amassing a vast network of international contacts that
the more parochial, and Egypt-based, Banna didn’t have. In 1945,
Ramadan traveled to Jerusalem, which was then a British-controlled

74 ‘ Devil’s Game

city under the Palestine Mandate, where the storm clouds of the war
between the Arabs and Jews were beginning to gather. Over the
coming years, Ramadan would spend a great deal of time traveling
between Jerusalem, Amman, Damascus, and Beirut, building the
Brotherhood’s chapters. On October 26, 1945, Ramadan opened the
Muslim Brotherhood’s first office in Jerusalem, 22 founding the orga¬
nization that, by the 1980s, would become known as the Islamic
Resistance Movement (Hamas). By 1947, twenty-five branches of the
Muslim Brotherhood existed in Palestine, with between 12,000 and
20,000 members. 23 In 1948, Ramadan helped to organize the Muslim
Brotherhood’s symbolically significant Islamic force that battled the
Jewish forces that established Israel that year.

Ramadan also made the first of many visits to Pakistan in the late
1940s, taking part in the first meetings of the World Muslim Congress
in Karachi in 1949 and 1951, where he flirted with becoming secretary-
general of the organization. 24 (The congress itself was denounced by
the Pakistan left as having been organized by “Anglo-American impe¬
rialism.”) 25 Pakistan had achieved independence from Great Britain a
year earlier, and as the first Islamic state it became a magnet for
Islamist ideologues, organizers, and scholars. A young Islamist named
Abul-Ala Mawdudi—who’d founded a Muslim Brotherhood-style
movement in Pakistan called the Islamic Group—was transforming
his movement into a political party. For the next decade, Pakistan
would become a kind of second home for Ramadan. The fledgling
Islamic state gave Ramadan a broadcast slot on Radio Pakistan, and
he enjoyed good relations with the Western-leaning government of
Pakistan, including with Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, who wrote
the preface to one of Ramadan’s books. 26

Ramadan’s stay in Pakistan wasn’t entirely voluntary. The Broth¬
erhood had been banned in Egypt, and Hassan al-Banna assassinated.
Ramadan returned to Egypt in 1950, when the Brotherhood made
one of its many comebacks, but he would periodically spend long
periods of time in Pakistan, where he worked closely with Mawdudi
and his Islamic Group. Ramadan also worked with Pakistan’s Muslim
League, and with official Pakistani support he traveled and lectured

Islam Meets the Cold War • 7 5

throughout the Arab world. At the time, politics in Pakistan was split
among radical Islamists, moderate Islamists, secular nationalists, and
the left. Meanwhile, the country was being drawn into pro-Western
military alliances. During several years in Karachi, Ramadan helped
Mawdudi organize a muscular phalanx of fanatical Islamic students
that battled Pakistan’s left, especially on university campuses. The
so-called Islamic Student Society, known by its Urdu initials as
the IJT, 27 modeled on Mussolini’s fascist squadristi, was a Ramadan
project. “Although organized under the supervision of the [Islamic
Group], IJT was greatly influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood of
Egypt. Between 1952 and 1955, Ramadan helped IJT leaders formal¬
ize an administrative structure and devise an organizational strategy.
The most visible marks of the brotherhood’s influence are IJT’s ‘study
circle’ and all-night study sessions, both of which were means of
indoctrinating new members and fostering organizational bonds,”
according to one expert, Vali Reza Nasr. The often-armed IJT thugs
clashed repeatedly with left-wing students on campus. “Egg toss¬
ing gradually gave way to more serious clashes, especially in Karachi
and Multan,” wrote Nasr. “Antileftist student activism had become
the IJT’s calling and increasingly determined its course of action. [The
IJT became] a soldiers brigade which would fight for Islam against
its enemies—secularists and leftists—within the government and
without.” 28

In between his trips to Pakistan, Ramadan also apparently worked
with Arab fundamentalists, especially among Palestinians and Jorda¬
nians who founded the so-called Islamic Liberation Party. 29 (Later, the
Liberation Party metastasized, relocating its headquarters to Ger¬
many and then spreading through Muslim Central Asia. It was
increasingly supported by Saudi Arabia. By the 1990s, it had become
an important violence-prone force allied to the Islamic Movement of
Uzbekistan and to A 1 Qaeda.) While in Jordan in the 1950s, Ramadan
also helped found the Jordanian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The leader of Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood was Abu Qurah, a
wealthy Jordanian merchant with close ties to King Abdullah and the
British-backed Hashemite monarchy. According to Marion Boulby,

76 • Devil’s Game

Banna sent Ramadan to Amman for the express purpose of getting the
Muslim Brotherhood of Jordan off the ground, and the king “granted
the Brotherhood legal status as a welfare organization, hoping to
secure its support against the secular opposition,” i.e., against the left.
As in Pakistan, the Brotherhood became a tool for suppressing the left
and Arab nationalists. Ramadan and Qurah “argued that in the twen¬
tieth century Egypt and the rest of the Islamic world were threatened
by the onslaught of communist and nationalist ideologies which denied
the supremacy of sharia in society.” 30

Ramadan’s presence in the Oval Office that day in 1953 was no
accident. Officially, Ramadan was in the United States to attend the
Colloquium on Islamic Culture at Princeton University, with a side
trip to Washington. The Library of Congress joined Princeton in put¬
ting together the nine-day program. It was an august event, full of
pomp and circumstance, held under the leafy greenery shading Prince¬
ton’s Nassau Hall, in the high-ceilinged Faculty Room. Among the
speakers and attendees were some of the leading Orientalists of the
era, men like Philip K. Hitti, T. Cuyler Young, and Bayly Winder of
Princeton, Wilfred Cantwell Smith of McGill University, Richard
Nelson Frye of Harvard University, Carleton Coon of the University
of Pennsylvania, and Kenneth Cragg, editor of the journal The Mus¬
lim World, from the Hartford Seminary Foundation. Directing the
conference was Dr. Bayard Dodge, the venerable former president of
the American University in Beirut.

According to the official record, the conference fortuitously took
advantage of the fact that a number of celebrated personages from the
Middle East were visiting. But the participants didn’t just “happen”
to have crossed the Atlantic. The colloquium was organized by the
U.S. government, which funded it, tapped participants it considered
useful or promising, and bundled them off to New Jersey. Hitti, per¬
haps the dean of the Orientalists, visited Cairo, Bahrain, Baghdad,
Beirut, New Delhi, and other cities to scout participants, and supple¬
mentary funding for the colloquium was sought from U.S. airlines,
including Pan Am and TWA, and from Aramco, the U.S. oil consor¬
tium in Saudi Arabia. Like many of the participants, Ramadan, a
hard-edged ideologue and no scholar, was visiting the conference as

Islam Meets the Cold War • 77

an all-expenses-paid guest. And the U.S. government was not exactly
in the dark about who he was.

Paying for the conference—including the expenses for transporting
attendees from the Middle East—was the International Information
Administration, a branch of the State Department, with roots in the
U.S. intelligence community. The IIA had a brief existence, officially
set up in 1952 and then incorporated, in 1953, into the CIA-connected
U.S. Information Agency. Among its responsibilities, the IIA oversaw
official U.S. “culture exchange programs,” such as the Princeton collo¬
quium. It’s also clear that a primary purpose of the colloquium was
political. A declassified IIA document labeled “Confidential—Security
Information,” says: “On the surface, the conference looks like an
exercise in pure learning. This in effect is the impression desired.” The
conference, it goes on, was designed to “bring together persons exert¬
ing great influence in formulating Muslim opinion in fields such as
education, science, law and philosophy and inevitably, therefore, on
politics.” Its goal was sweeping. “Among the various results expected
from the colloquium are the impetus and direction that may be given
to the Renaissance movement within Islam itself.” 31

America’s ambassador in Cairo at the time was the veteran diplo¬
mat Jefferson Caffery, a Louisiana lawyer then nearing the end of a
stellar foreign service career that spanned four decades. He’d been in
Cairo since 1949, ultimately serving six years in the languid capital on
the Nile. In July 1953 Caffery penned a classified cable suggesting
that Ramadan be invited to the Princeton conclave. Caffery’s dispatch
provides a revealing glimpse into how much U.S. intelligence had
already gathered on the Muslim Brotherhood and its leadership,
reach, and activities. Caffery’s dispatch provides a capsule biography
of Ramadan and a thumbnail sketch of the Muslim Brotherhood. But,
read in full, it is eerily sanitized, making no mention of the Brother¬
hood’s involvement in terrorism and violence, and nowhere does
Caffery cite their commitment to an Islamic state under the Koran.
Caffery, a highly experienced diplomat, is not naive, and it is clear
from his account that he (and perhaps the CIA) were willing to over¬
look any violence tied to the Brothers and were targeting Ramadan
for recruitment as either ally or agent:

78 • Devil’s Game

Saeed Ramadhan is considered to be among the most learned
scholars of Islamic culture in the Ikhwan el Muslimin (Moslem
Brotherhood). A graduate of the Faculty of Law from Fouad
University in Cairo in 1945, he takes but few cases and devotes
most of his time to the study of Islam. Born in 1925, he is young
in years but old in experience.

At present he is engaged as editor in chief of El Musliman, a
monthly magazine now in its second year, which publishes arti¬
cles on Islamic law and culture by scholars through the Muslim
world. Its circulation is about 10,000 and subscribers reach from
Tunisia to Indonesia. As General Secretary of the World Islamic
Conference, he travels extensively throughout the Islamic States
and has recently returned from conferences in Pakistan. When in
Egypt he gives weekly radio broadcasts in Islamic culture and
interpretation of the Koran.

In 1940 Ramadhan began his studies of Islam under Hassan al
Banna, former Supreme Guide of the Ikhwan el Muslimin, and
became editor of El Shihab, a magazine introduced by the latter in
1947. It was a monthly magazine for articles on Islamic law and
culture but ceased publication after five issues under pressure from
ex-King Farouk’s government. Shortly thereafter the Brotherhood
was outlawed and upwards of 2,000 of its members arrested.
Saeed Ramadhan left for Pakistan in time to prevent possible
detention. He lived there about a year during which time he had
two radio broadcasts weekly which were beamed to the Arab
States, including Egypt. Late in 1949 the Muslim League of Pak¬
istan requested Ramadhan to give a series of lectures on Islamic
Culture in many parts of the Middle East. Starting in Sudan, he
gave talks mainly in universities through Egypt and ending in
Turkey. 32

Caffery had been contacted by an unnamed American agent, on
behalf of Mohammed el Bakay of Al Azhar, the centuries-old Islamic
center of learning in Cairo. Bakay, who also traveled to Princeton,
described Ramadan as “a distinguished member of the Muslim Broth¬
erhood” and suggested that he be invited to attend the Princeton gath¬
ering, adding that the Society of Muslim Brothers was willing to help
pay his expenses. 33 Concluded Caffery:

Islam Meets the Cold War • 79

The Embassy believes that Ramadhan’s scholarly attainments are
sufficient to make him eligible to attend the Colloquium on Islamic
Culture. His position with the Muslim Brotherhood makes it impor¬
tant that his desire for an invitation be considered carefully in light
of the possible effects of offending this important body . 34

For the next four decades, Ramadan would turn up, Zelig-like, as a
key operative in virtually every manifestation of radical, political Islam,
from the Muslim Brotherhood-led terrorism in Egypt in the 1950s and
1960s to the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran in the 1970s to the civil
war in Algeria in the 1990s. There’s no concrete evidence to prove that
Ramadan was recruited as a CIA agent in the 1950s, but it’s clear that
his invitation to the Princeton colloquium marked him as a potential
target for recruitment, and he would later become a crucial ally of
Saudi Arabia’s royal family in assembling an Islamic bloc of nations
and movements opposed to the spread of communism and to Soviet
expansion along its southern frontier. According to declassified docu¬
ments in the Swiss archives, reported by Sylvain Besson in Le Temps
of Geneva, in the 1960s the Swiss authorities—then hosting Ramadan
at his Islamic Center in Geneva—looked upon Ramadan favorably,
thanks to his anti-communist views. And they added: “Said Ramadan
is, among other things, an intelligence agent of the English and the
Americans. What’s more, I believe that he has rendered services—
according to an intelligence plan—to the [Swiss federal police].”
Ramadan’s dossier, reported Le Temps, includes several documents
indicating his connections to “certain Western secret services.” 35

Islam: Bulwark against Communism?

Were Ramadan, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Islamic right useful
allies in the Cold War struggle against communism? Was Islam itself a
bulwark against a foreign, atheistic ideology? In one sense, the answer
was no. Both communism and nationalism could and did easily
attract adherents among the masses of Muslims. In Iraq, for instance,

8 o • Devil’s Game

the Iraqi Communist Party, the Arab world’s largest, won the alle¬
giance of millions of Iraqi Shiites during the period after World War
II, and by the late 1950s the party was strong enough to organize a
demonstration in Baghdad that attracted more than one million
Iraqis. And Egypt’s Nasser, whose Cairo-based Voice of the Arabs
radio broadcasts carried his nationalist message into Syria, Jordan,
Lebanon, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, gathered an enormous following
and for much of the 1950s and 1960s was by far the most popular
Arab political leader. Just as Christians in Europe joined the commu¬
nist parties en masse, in the Islamic world Muslims unhappy with
their status or their quality of life, or who were opposed to Western
imperialism and Anglo-American influence in the Middle East, opted
for communism or, more often, for Arab nationalism.

Yet even if Muslims were attracted to left-wing ideologies, some
Orientalists and U.S. policy makers felt that there was still reason to
believe that political Islam might yet be mobilized in forms that were
explicitly anti-communist. In the Middle East, organized Islam took
many forms, of course. First and foremost was the traditionalist,
clergy-based religion, organized around mosques, religious founda¬
tions or endowments, Islamic courts, and other institutions, many of
which had a powerful social impact but were not explicitly political.
Next, there was “state Islam,” such as existed in Saudi Arabia since
its founding in the 1920s or in Pakistan since independence (and espe¬
cially since the 1970s), in which entire nations were organized accord¬
ing to religious identity and Islamic law, and it was sometimes
difficult to see the dividing line between Islam and the state. And
finally, there was the emerging “New Right” in the Muslim world,
including the Muslim Brotherhood and other explicitly political orga¬
nizations or parties committed to the establishment of an Islamic
republic. To those in the West looking for ideological forces in the
Middle East that could provide an intellectual counterweight to the
radical appeal of communism, all three of these forms seemed attrac¬
tive at one time or another, and indeed there was overlap among
them.

In the United States, there was alarm over the fact that the Arab
“elite”—that is, opinion leaders, intellectuals, politicians, journalists,

Islam Meets the Cold War • 8

and the like—were increasingly drawn to left-wing movements and
parties. Among the masses, there was more reluctance to abandon the
Koran for Das Kapital, especially among ill-educated peasants,
Bedouin tribesmen, and pro-capitalist merchants and bazaar leaders,
making them harder to mobilize on behalf of Marxism and Arab
socialism. So the question was: What sort of ideological framework
might be able to attract both the Arab and Muslim masses on one
hand and to capture some important segment of the Arab elite on the
other? For some analysts, the “new Islam,” led by intellectuals and
political operatives such as Banna, Ramadan, and Mawdudi, seemed
made to order. The Muslim Brotherhood was having some success on
university campuses, attracting students—especially engineers, scien¬
tists, physicians, and management and business students. Could such
a movement, especially with the support of the Saudi Arabian royal
family, counteract the Marxist-nationalist bloc? And could U.S. pro¬
paganda, stressing America’s own religious values in contrast to the
atheistic Soviet Union, draw the Muslim masses into the American
camp—or at least away from Moscow? It seemed worth a try.

One who seemed to think it might be worthwhile was Bernard
Lewis, the inventor of the phrase “clash of civilizations.” For five
decades, Lewis, who is currently an emeritus professor at Princeton,
has been arguably the single most influential theorist in the field of
Islamic scholarship. Yet, for all that time, Lewis has been intensely con¬
troversial, largely because he has taken a highly partisan, conservative—
and later, “neoconservative”—point of view, and because of his strong
affinity for Israel. A 1953 essay by Professor Lewis, “Communism and
Islam,” is an important example of the then-current thinking on the
great battle of ideologies.

Lewis made it clear that the people of the Muslim world seemed
intent on creating a string of authoritarian governments and that, if
the West’s objective was to oppose the spread of communism, that
wouldn’t be so bad. “If the peoples of Islam are forced to make a
straight choice, to abandon their own traditions in favour of either
Communism or parliamentarianism, then we are at a great disadvan¬
tage,” he wrote. “It is fortunate, both for Islam and for the Western
world, that the choice is not restricted to these two simple alternatives,

81 • Devil’s Game

for the possibility still remains for the Muslim peoples of restoring,
perhaps in a modified form, their own tradition; of evolving a form of
government which, though authoritarian, and perhaps even auto¬
cratic, is nevertheless far removed from the cynical tyranny of
European-style dictatorship.” 36

After endorsing the “fortunate” likelihood of authoritarian Mus¬
lim regimes, Lewis went on to suggest that, indeed, Islam would ulti¬
mately prove infertile ground for Marxist ideas:

Communism is not and cannot be a religion, while Islam, for the
great mass of believers, still is; and that is the core of the Islamic
resistance to Communist ideas. Though their belief in liberty be
too weak to sustain them, their belief in God may yet be strong
enough. The Islamic peoples are still profoundly religious in the
deepest and simplest meaning of the word. Islam as a religion is no
more anti-Communist than Christianity; in fact, as I have sug¬
gested, rather less so. But it is more potent as a force affecting the
lives and thoughts of its adherents. Pious Muslims—and most
Muslims are pious—will not long tolerate an atheist creed, nor
one that violates their traditional religious moral principles. . . .

The present revolt of the Muslims against the immorality and
opportunism of their own and of some Western leaders may tem¬
porarily favor the Communists, with their appearance of selfless
devotion to an ideal, but will work against Communism when
Muslims come to see the realities behind the propaganda. Let us
hope that they will not take too long over it.

At the Princeton colloquium, held the same year Lewis’s essay was
written, a marker was laid down by a Pakistani scholar, Mazheruddin
Siddiqi, a fellow at the Institute of Islamic Culture in Lahore. A for¬
mer government official and prolific writer, educated at the University
of Madras in India, Siddiqi was the author of Islam and Communism,
Marxism and Islam, and Historical Materialism and Islam. In his
address to the Princeton gathering, Siddiqi made it clear that commu¬
nism could be resisted only if its opposition was faith-based and built
on Islamic fundamentals. Siddiqi attacked Muslim “authoritarian¬
ism,” but also unleashed a bitter salvo against the Islamic world’s sec¬
ularists, “the pseudo-scientists and half-baked intellectuals who

Islam Meets the Cold War • 83

surreptitiously or openly advocate the gradual annihilation of reli¬
gion,” and who argue that religion is “a mass of superstitions, dog¬
mas, and supernatural doctrines which tend to belittle the power of
reason.” Secularists, not communists, are the greatest danger to the
stability of Pakistan and, by implication, the broader Middle East:

Communist atheism [Siddiqi said] has a power of inspiration
which pure rationalism does not have. It is a faith as well as a sci¬
ence, a social gospel as well as a metaphysical system. It is the only
real substitute for religious faith which the champions of science
and technology are seeking to undermine in Pakistan.

It is the socio-economic significance of Islam that makes it a
standing barrier against Communism. The Muslim masses are
attached to the Islamic idea, just because it offers them the prom¬
ise of social and economic equality and freedom of expression.

If any attempt is made to deny the socio-economic content of
Islamic teachings, Communism is sure to rush into the vacuum
that would be created. For, as I have pointed out, Communism
offers both the emotional satisfaction of religious faith and the
promise of social and economic security.... In the Islamic world,
the choice is not between Communism and secular democracy, but
between Communism and liberal Islam.. .. The greatest danger
to the stability of Pakistan comes neither from reactionary theolo¬
gians nor from the Communists who can offer nothing better to a
Muslim, but from those who without any knowledge of the deeper
aspects of Islam . . . are trying to create a spiritual vacuum in our
life that would safely let in Communism. 37

Kenneth Cragg, The Muslim World editor, had a similar message.
Cragg’s paper, “The Intellectual Impact of Communism upon Contem¬
porary Islam,” originally delivered at the colloquium, was published a
few months later in the Middle East Journal . 39 In it, he presented a
sophisticated argument for an Islamic revival. “We in religious resis¬
tance to Communism,” wrote Cragg, “understand that the Muslim
world must develop an ifitellectual response to the challenge of com¬
munism, on a level that is spiritual, metaphysical, and moral, in order
to combat the Marxist ‘eschatology’ that ‘looks forward to a Commu¬
nist Heaven on earth.’ ” Cragg offered an antidote to this seductive

84 • Devil’s Game

Marxism: “With Islam, as countless modern writers have explained,
[the perfect society] is the true Islamic society—some would say the
true Islamic State.” And he concludes with a hopeful vision: “May it
not be that by virtue of this common need to give a worthy answer to
Communism the two faiths, Islam and Christianity, have the opportu¬
nity of a fruitful relationship with each other?” Cragg cites a comment
from the Princeton gathering, in which the occasion of Turkish troops
fighting in the Korean War was evoked, to conclude: “Now at last
after 1,300 years of largely fruitless controversy, men of the two great
monotheistic religions are struggling shoulder to shoulder against god¬
less materialism.”

Yet, in the 1950s, the idea that Islam would join the “Christian”
West in a jihad-crusade against “godless materialism” was decidedly a
minority point of view. On one hand, many hard-headed strategists—
who might be called “realists” today—felt that Islamism was too
weak or uncertain a force to be relied upon. A second pole of opposi¬
tion came from some of those who believed that Islam could never
serve the anti-communist cause because it was inherently too anti-
Western.

Hermann Eilts recalls the idea that Islam was an ally in the struggle
against Moscow as an “overstatement.”

“There was a view that Islam and communism were simply anti¬
thetical,” says Eilts, who began his service in Iran and Saudi Arabia in
the 1940s. “Very few people in government even thought very much
about Islam... . There were those who said, ‘It’s helpful to keep the
communists out.’ But no one really took it very seriously. The general
view in the U.S. government and in the academic world was that
Islam was becoming a shrinking political factor, and sharia law,
Islamic law, was being relegated to personal status. And I remember
so well American economic specialists coming out to the countries in
which I served and making the point that the quicker you get rid of
Islam, the more quickly you are going to develop, because Islam was
seen by them as a barrier to economic development.”

John C. Campbell, for decades the Council on Foreign Relations’
chief Middle East strategist, led a CFR task force, launched in 1954,

Islam Meets the Cold War • 8 5

comprised of many of the heavyweights of the U.S. foreign policy
establishment. For Campbell, Islam may or may not have been a bar¬
rier to economic growth, but it didn’t appear to be a barrier against
the USSR:

Certainly Islam cannot be counted on to serve as such a barrier.

The theory that communism and Soviet influence could never
make inroads in the Moslem world because they are materialistic
and atheistic has not been borne out. Religion does have a signifi¬
cant place in Middle Eastern society. It colors both popular and
official attitudes. But it does not establish an absolute immunity to
a political virus such as fascism or communism. Communist the¬
ory does have certain superficial parallels with Islamic dogma, and
the promise of a better material life is not inconsistent with it.
Above all, the impact of the modern world on Islam has produced
two major trends which tend to open the door toward communist
influence: first, the inability of traditional doctrines and institu¬
tions to hold the loyalty of the intellectual leaders and new genera¬
tions bent on finding a way out of material backwardness; and
second, the revulsion against the West, which, while often rein¬
forcing the sense of dedication to Islam, has often created also a
sense of identification with whatever theories and political forces
were hostile to the West.... In the Arab lands and Iran, the anti-
Western nationalist movement has had a strong admixture of reli¬
gious feeling, even fanaticism.

The inherently anti-Western bias of political Islam, thought Campbell,
ought to preclude any idea of its usefulness in U.S. strategy. 39

Despite such warnings, the United States experimented, often
clumsily, with Islamism in the years between 1945 and 1957.

Even as early as 1945, when British and American planners began
thinking about how to build alliances and a system of defense against
the USSR across its vast southern border, Islam was factored in. The
British-inspired League of Arab States, for instance, was considered
weak because it didn’t include Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan. So, it was
proposed at one point to convert the Arab League into a League of
Islamic States, to include at least some of the Northern Tier countries. 40

86 • Devil’s Game

That idea fizzled, and subsequent policies focused less on Islam and
more on direct Anglo-American power. Still, during the Truman and
Eisenhower years, the United States carried out a series of efforts to
mobilize political Islam in the Cold War, and to use Islam as a weapon
against Soviet influence. Some of them were serious-minded. Others
were clumsy, even hilariously misguided.

Consider the “Red Pig” program. Part of the American approach
toward political Islam in the 1950s was to try to win propaganda
points by emphasizing that the United States was a pious nation and
that the Soviet Union persecuted religion. In 1951, the U.S. Informa¬
tion Service in Baghdad proudly announced the launch of a propa¬
ganda campaign designed to win the hearts and minds of Iraqi
Muslims by a “comparison of the state of religion in the United States
and in ‘a Communist state.’ ” A poster was created “which showed
the Communist state as a big bully maltreating a man labeled ‘Reli¬
gion.’ ” A second poster

tells the story of the Greedy Red Pig and how he came to a bad
end. The fact that the pig is wearing a Red Star on his armband
and has at his rear instead of the normally piggy curl a hammer-
and-sickle tail has not escaped the observers.. .. Others remarked
on the suitability of making the Communist villain a pig because
of the resistance appeal it has for Moslems. We feel that a whole
series of cartoon-posters can be developed, using the Red Pig as
the central figure. 41

Edward S. Crocker, the foreign service official who helped design the
campaign, helpfully included thirty-two illustrations of the Red Pig
campaign with his dispatch.

The fledgling Central Intelligence Agency also experimented with
creative, if half-cocked, ways of connecting with the Islamist movement.
Some of them are told in the raucously funny book The Game of
Nations by Miles Copeland, the CIA operations officer who, during the
19 50s, served as a liaison to Nasser and who spent many years
embroiled in Arab political skullduggery. Copeland retired early from
the CIA but maintained close connections to dozens of its current and
former operatives, especially to Kermit and Archie Roosevelt, grandsons

Islam Meets the Cold War • 8 7

of Teddy Roosevelt. A back-slapping southerner, Copeland used his
good-oF-boy charm to mask a sophisticated understanding of the
Arab world. He reported that around the same time as the “Red Pig”
campaign, the CIA came up with the “Moslem Billy Graham” proj¬
ect. In 1951, Secretary of State Dean Acheson “borrowed Kermit
Roosevelt from the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency to head
a highly secret committee of specialists—some from the State Depart¬
ment, some from the Department of Defense, and some brought in as
consultants from business concerns and universities (and none from
the CIA except Roosevelt himself)—to study the Arab world,” said
Copeland. At the gathering, an operation designed to mobilize Islamic
religious sentiments was launched. “Someone advanced the idea of
promoting a ‘Moslem Billy Graham’ to mobilize religious fervor in a
great move against Communism and actually got as far as selecting a
wild-eyed Iraqi holy man to send on a tour of Arab countries.” The
identity of the Iraqi wasn’t revealed. But Copeland considered the
entire effort to be a learning experience. “The project did no harm,
and the managing of it taught the committee much about what was
wrong with their basic planning assumptions—lessons that were put
to good use later when [Saudi Arabia’s] King Feisal’s advisers put
Feisal up to much the same kind of project, with Feisal himself as the
holy man.” 42

Another, less ambitious CIA project involved some sardonic pro¬
paganda aimed at the USSR’s influence in Egypt. The CIA unearthed
some pre-World War I anti-Islamic tracts with titles like Mohammed
Never Existed, The Harmful Consequences of Fasting during
Ramadan, and Against the Veil, and reissued them, this time attribut¬
ing them to the Soviet embassy in Cairo . 43

The CIA also experimented with using Egypt as a center for reach¬
ing out to Islamic activists in the Middle East and Africa. The vehicle
for the effort was none other than Anwar Sadat. Since World War II,
Sadat had been close to the Muslim Brotherhood, serving as the liai¬
son between the organization and Nasser’s Free Officers movement in
the 1940s and early 1950s. Sadat approached Nasser with the idea of
creating an Islamic Congress and, when Nasser agreed, Sadat was
appointed to lead it. According to Miles Copeland, “Religious

88 • Devil’s Game

attaches were sent to various Egyptian missions abroad and assigned
the task of watching for opportunities to use common religious inter¬
ests to achieve at least tactical ‘union.’. . . The American Government
at first gave limited encouragement to the program.” 44 Later, when
relations between the United States and Nasser reached the breaking
point, the CIA’s support for the venture was withdrawn.

More seriously, the United States began to explore with Saudi Ara¬
bia the possibility of creating an Islamic bloc, whose potential was
noted by some U.S. officials and diplomats beginning in the 1940s. It
was still too early for the U.S.-Saudi Islamic alliance to take concrete
form as it later would. However, the question of whether Islam could
serve as a barrier against communism, Marxist ideas, and radical
Arab nationalism occupied the thoughts of many academics, policy
makers, and foreign service officers.

In 1951, William A. Eddy, the U.S. consul general in Dhahran,
Saudi Arabia, wrote a detailed account of discussions he’d had with
various Muslim leaders, including the king of Saudi Arabia, the mufti
of Jerusalem, an Islamic leader in Egypt, and an Arab League official
suggesting a strategy for the “Christian, democratic West joining with
the Muslim world in a common moral front against Communism.”
According to Eddy, the mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the British-
linked Palestinian who’d been a supporter of Nazism during the
1930s and 1940s, “spoke of Russia and Communism with the deepest
hate, insisted that we were on the wrong side in the last war [World
War II] and should have been allied with Germany against Russia. .. .
He spoke cordially of the cooperation which would be offered by
Muslims to promote a joint propaganda with Christians to make this
danger clear.” Regarding Saudi Arabia, Eddy explicitly noted the
power of the fundamentalist Wahhabi movement:

While in an audience with the King of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz al
Saud, this week, the King addressed himself strongly to the same
point. He affirmed that both Christianity and Islam are threatened
by Communism, their common enemy. . . . Muslims in the East,
and Christians in the West, should be allies in this trouble to
defend their historic faith. ... As head of the puritanical Wahhabi
movement to restore the pure faith and practices of Islam, the

Islam Meets the Cold War • 89

King is without any doubt the most representative and influential
Muslim in the world today . 45

Eddy sent copies of the letter to three officials of Aramco, the consor¬
tium made up of Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, and Chevron, and to
Brigadier General Robert A. McClure, director of psychological war¬
fare, Department of Defense.

Eddy was more than a low-level consular official. During World
War II, Eddy had been an intelligence operative for the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS), where he’d gotten experience using political
Islam on America’s behalf. “Born in Syria of missionary parents, he
spoke fluent Arabic and was a distinguished scholar and war hero
who had lost a leg in the First World War.” With great derring-do,
Eddy conducted operations in parts of German-occupied North Africa.
“Eddy formed chains of informants to gather intelligence, spread sub¬
versive propaganda, and organize a resistance movement.” That resis¬
tance, however, would include a Muslim secret society, led by
collaborators known only by the nicknames “Strings” and “Tassels.”
Strings was the “leader of a powerful Muslim brotherhood in north¬
ern Morocco.” 46

A year later, an unsigned 1952 diplomatic report entitled “Conver¬
sation with Prince Saud,” labeled “Secret: Security Information,” said
that Aramco was paying for a print shop and a broadcasting station
in Riyadh for the propagation of religious tracts. Prince Saud, who
would soon become king, declared that Saudi Arabia was “a leader
among the Arab states because of ... the presence of the Holy Cities
within the Kingdom.” And Saud had another point to make, the U.S.
diplomat added:

Some day, he said, he was going to give tangible form to this leader¬
ship. He said that he had plans which he did not wish to discuss in
detail now to spark plug a pan-Islamic movement. He said it could
do a great deal of good in the Muslim countries by causing them to
work together as a unit but again he repeated that he was not ready
to discuss the plan in detail.... I told him that his information
about Islamic unity was very interesting and we would be very glad
to know more about it when his plans were clearly formulated.. . .

90 • Devil’s Game

I told him that we would welcome such a movement under his
leadership because we were sure that it would be friendly . 47

While some foreign policy functionaries had their doubts, efforts
to encourage Faisal in this direction were undertaken tentatively any¬
way, without a real grasp of either the politics or the culture of the
Muslim world.

David Long, a retired foreign service officer and specialist on Saudi
Arabia and the Gulf, says that in the period after World War II the
United States was operating blind. “We didn’t know anything,” he
says. “When we get up to the period after World War II, yes, there
were times when Islam was used as a rallying cry for the political issue
of the day.” But, says Long, U.S. policy lacked an understanding of
historical precedent. “We were trying a replay of what they’d tried a
thousand years ago,” he says, referring to the caliphates of old.
“Their ideology is ancient. Well, we never heard of any of this when
we jumped into this 1,300-year-old saga, simply because we were the
biggest player in the game.” Some Americans, said Long, had a rudi¬
mentary familiarity with the Middle East and Islamic culture. “It was
usually said that the oil company kids and the missionary kids knew a
little. But I’ve talked to them, many of them, over the years. They
lived in their own little world, and what they knew was in fact very,
very limited. We wanted oil, and we wanted to fight communism, but
we weren’t really all that interested in all that crap about Islam. We
were neophytes—way, way behind the curve of what the British and
French picked up after all the time they’d spent there.” Asked whether
the United States actively supported political Islam as an alternative
to communism in those days. Long says, “We encouraged it. But we
didn’t create it.”

Adds Long:

The deal was, the Saudis were vulnerable. We would provide secu¬
rity for them, and they would provide oil for us.

When it came to Nasser, Faisal reviewed the bidding and
opposed pan-Arabism. He decided that they were socialists and
that they were against Islam. So, while we and the Israelis

Islam Meets the Cold War • 91

were demonizing Nasser, here was Faisal opposing him. He was
worried that Muslim youth would turn to socialism and abandon
Islam. We didn’t understand that—we didn’t understand Faisal’s
motivations. We tried to set up an alliance between Saudi Arabia
and Tunisia, forgetting that Bourguiba was a secularist. We said,
‘Hey, you’re all moderates.’ But to Faisal, Bourguiba was an
apostate.

So we were going in the same direction, but we didn’t under¬
stand it. We tried to give it a different slant, that of power politics.

To the Saudis, however, it was based on the idea that they are the
defenders of the faith, of the Muslim holy places. But we saw it in
a power politics framework . 48

As Long suggests, the American “neophytes” stumbled into an
alliance of sorts with Islamic fundamentalism almost without realiz¬
ing what was happening. Very few American diplomats and scholars
had studied the relationship between Islam and politics, and those
who did were often muddled. In 1951, the Middle East Institute con¬
vened a two-day conference on “Islam in the Modern World,” at
which Philip W. Ireland, a senior State Department official who’d
served as U.S. charge d’affaires in Baghdad, delivered an address on
the relationship of Islam, democracy, and communism, wondering
“whether present trends will carry Islam into the camp of Commu¬
nism or into that of Democracy.” After noting that “Communism”—
actually, he was referring to nationalism—was making gains in Syria,
Iraq, and Jordan, Ireland noted:

In Saudi Arabia, the Yemen, and the Hadramaut, the primitive
and austere character of Islam has indeed proven, practically as
well as theoretically, a barrier to Communism . 49

Ireland did not put much stock in the theocratic version of Islam,
expressing the hope that somehow Muslims would be able to blend
Islam with modern political theories. Leading U.S. strategists worried
that as Islam modernized, Muslims would abandon their faith for sec¬
ularism, and that such a trend would open the doors to the spread of
Marxist ideas in the Middle East. Bayard Dodge, the highly influential

92. • Devil’s G

ex-president of the American University in Beirut (19x3 to 1948), told
the same Middle East Institute group:

Today nationalism of a materialistic type is becoming a strong ele¬
ment in Islamic thought and society. And that, of course, works
directly against the old idea of Pan-Islam or the Caliphate, of
Islam as a great organized brotherhood. To a large extent, nation¬
alism has taken the place of the religious side of the Pan-Islam
movement. Needless to say, it is the young Muslim, uninterested in
Islam as a great system, who is particularly likely to become a
Communist. . .. The reaction of the Muslims of the rising genera¬
tion is an exceedingly unfortunate one, as so many of them are
casting aside their religion, their morality, or their loyalty to the
cult. They live licentious lives, drinking,.. . gambling,. . . amus¬
ing themselves in cabarets and houses of prostitution.

If Islam is undermined, if materialism and radicalism come in,
with Communist thought perhaps permeating it, the outcome will
certainly be a major tragedy for the world. 50

Loyalty to “the cult”? Living “licentious lives ... in houses of prosti¬
tution”? Dodge, the scion of Protestant missionaries with roots in the
Middle East of the nineteenth century, sounds more like a Bible-
thumping revivalist than a foreign policy analyst. And, in fact, in his
address, Dodge praised the Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey’s anti-
Ataturk religious revival, and Persians under Reza Shah who are
“finding that they must go back and have more religion if they are to
combat Communism.” 51 Dodge here expressed almost exactly the
sought-after Christian-Muslim alliance that so many U.S. policy makers
dreamed of, regardless of how impractical it seemed. Worse, though, it
was precisely what the Middle East didn’t need, as it struggled with
modernity, and as secular leaders everywhere in the region (except Saudi
Arabia) sought to reduce or eliminate the role of Islam, the clergy, the
Wahhabis, and the Muslim Brotherhood. What Dodge, and many
others, feared is that communism, and not Western-style capitalism,
would win the hearts and minds of Arabs, Turks, Persians, and Indi¬
ans freed of the shackles of religious belief.

Many American diplomats, of course, equally concerned about
promoting U.S. interests overseas and combating communism, took

Islam Meets the Cold War ■ 9 3

the sensible view that the United States ought to concentrate on eco¬
nomic development in the Middle East, and that facilitating the
region’s transition away from backward religious fundamentalism to
modern, and Western, ideas of organizing society might not necessar¬
ily benefit the Soviet Union. Many, too, believed that Islam should not
be anything more than a system of personal belief, not a political or
social system.

But as the 1950s wore on, their voices were less and less influen¬
tial. Nasser’s nonalignment, or “positive neutralism,” began to look
more and more like a communist Trojan Horse to the Dulles brothers
and their Cold War co-thinkers. So, too, did the nationalism of Prime
Minister Mossadegh in Iran. In both cases, as the Eisenhower admin¬
istration moved to confront these regimes, it reached for one of the
most dangerous implements in its tool box: Islamic fundamentalism.

THE WAR AGAINST NASSER AND MOSSADEGH

In the early 1950s, two nationalist leaders emerged in two of the
most powerful countries of the Middle East, Egypt and Iran. In Egypt,
Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Free Officers ousted that country’s dissolute
king and threatened to spark revolution in Saudi Arabia, the heart of
the world’s energy supply. In Iran, a freely elected democrat and
socialist-inclined leader named Mohammed Mossadegh successfully
challenged the ruling shah of Iran, forced him to flee, and asserted
his country’s right to take over the oil industry from Britain’s Anglo-
Persian Oil Company.

In both cases Great Britain, the United States, and their intelligence
agencies went into action, overthrowing Mossadegh and trying but
failing to do the same to Nasser, and in both cases, MI6 and the CIA
used the Islamic right as a cat’s-paw. In Egypt, they used the Muslim
Brotherhood, and in Iran they mobilized a group of ayatollahs that
included the ideological godfather of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Perhaps the greatest twin tragedies, or lost opportunities, for the
United States in the Middle East in the past half century are the Amer¬
ican failures to embrace Gamal Abdel Nasser and Mohammed
Mossadegh when they emerged, in the 1950s, as leaders of their
people’s aspirations. That error created a residue of resentment, bit-

The War against Nasser and Mossadegh • 9 5

rerness, and anger in the Middle East, feeding widespread, lingering
anti-Americanism to this day and even providing fuel for A 1 Qaeda’s
recruiters. Yet it was a folly compounded by yet another massive
error: the U.S. decision to support Saudi Arabia as the counter pole to
Arab and Persian nationalism, and to tie itself to a worldwide net¬
work of Islamists sponsored by the Saudis. It was a decision whose
consequences led, indirectly, to the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini’s
theocracy, the destruction of Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden’s ter¬
rorist international.

The Brotherhood against Nasser

From 1954, when Nasser consolidated power over his rivals, until
1970, when he died, Nasser garnered unparalleled, even legendary,
support in Egypt, and throughout the Arab world. Andre Malraux,
the French writer, said, of Nasser: “He will enter history as represen¬
tative of Egypt, the same as Napoleon of France.” 1 William R. Polk,
an official at the National Security Council in the 1960s, said: “He
was the John Kennedy of the Arab world.” 2 Five million people
turned out for his funeral, and that doesn’t count the tens of millions
of Arabs who mourned privately, “the ones who wept in coffee¬
houses, at home, alone, in groups, silently, loudly, through prayer, in
cars in faraway California, or who suffered the pain of his death in
frozen numbness.” 3 Yet over and over, in the 1950s and again in the
1960s, the United States stiff-armed Nasser, and worse. Behind the
scenes, the CIA schemed to topple him.

“We were trying to overthrow Nasser,” says Ed Kane, a CIA opera¬
tions officer who was stationed in Cairo in the late 1950s and early
1960s. “The Agency was involved in a covert operation—a very inept
one, I might add—relying on members of the ancien regime, who had
absolutely no power. We were attempting to find elements who could
overthrow him, mostly figures tied to the old regime—landowners,
industrialists, and other old enemies of Nasser’s. It was a futile project.” 4

Half a century ago, Nasser symbolized Arab revolution, self-
determination, and independence. The seizure of power by the Free

96 • Devil’s Game

Officers in Egypt came during an era when the entire Arab world, from
Morocco to Iraq, was locked in the grip of a political ice age. Morocco,
Algeria, and Tunisia were French colonies; Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the
United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Yemen were British colonies. Iraq,
Jordan, and Saudi Arabia were kingdoms ruled by monarchies installed
by London. And Egypt, under the wobbly King Farouq, was the politi¬
cal and economic center of the Arab world. By taking power in Egypt,
Nasser electrified the political class in the Arab world, inspiring a host of
would-be imitators, liberation-minded political parties, and army revo¬
lutionists. From 1954 onward, through agents, political support, and
the powerful Voice of the Arabs radio in Cairo, and by virtue of his
charismatic appeal, Nasser led the independence movement in the Arab
Middle East. From 1956 to 1958, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq were
rocked by rebellions, Iraq’s king fell, and Syria united with Egypt in
Nasser’s United Arab Republic, a short-lived but exciting experiment in
unifying the Arab world. The Algerian revolution drew moral and mate¬
rial support from Cairo, before winning independence in 1962., the same
year that Yemen underwent a Nasser-inspired revolt, triggering a proxy
war pitting Saudi Arabia against Egypt. Even as late as 1969, a year
before Nasser’s death, Libya’s king was overthrown and Sudan’s right-
wing regime eliminated by military leaders loyal to Nasser.

In the Manichean, with-us-or-against-us world of the Cold War,
Nasser was loathed and demonized by London, Washington, and Tel
Aviv. Around the world, from Guatemala to the Congo to Indonesia—
and in Iran—the CIA was busy getting rid of leaders not because they
were communists, but because their independent streak made them
untrustworthy interlocutors in the war between the superpowers.
Nasser was no exception.

Unlike other leaders in Latin America or Africa, however, Nasser,
with his revolutionary outlook, threatened the very heart of America’s
post-World War II strategy: the vast oil fields of Saudi Arabia. Not
only was Egypt a potential military rival to Saudi Arabia, not only did
Cairo clash with Riyadh in a shooting war in Yemen, not only did
Nasser inspire Arabs in Saudi Arabia with republican ideals, but the
Egyptian leader even won over some of Saudi Arabia’s royal family,

The War against Nasser and Mossadegh • 97

who, led by Prince Talal, formed the so-called “Free Princes,” defected
to Egypt, and demanded the establishment of a republic in Arabia.

As the United States built its network of alliances in the Middle
East, relying more and more on non-Arab states, including Turkey,
Iran, and Israel, there developed an “Arab cold war,” with Egypt at
one end and Saudi Arabia at the other. Superficially, it seemed as if the
struggle within the Arab world pitted Soviet-leaning Arab countries
against American-allied ones, but in fact the Soviet Union had no true
allies and few friends in the region. The real dynamic that played out
between 1954 and 1970 occurred between competing visions of the
future of the Middle East. On one hand, there was Nasser’s secular,
modernizing, industrial Arab world of independent but cooperative
Arab republics. On the other was Saudi Arabia’s semi-feudal array of
monarchies, with their natural resources put at the West’s disposal, in
which the royal families’ ace-in-the-hole was the Muslim Brotherhood
and the Islamic right.

A contingent of America’s Arabists rejected the strategy of isolat¬
ing Nasser, and some even saw him as the Arab world’s savior. “In the
beginning Nasser had some strong support from the Agency and from
the embassy,” says Kane, referring to the period from 1952 to 1954. 5
According to one widely cited account, by Miles Copeland in The
Game of Nations, the CIA even encouraged the Free Officers in their
revolution, after first trying to get King Farouq to modernize Egypt.
The legendary Kermit (“Kim”) Roosevelt, the man who would coor¬
dinate the 1953 CIA coup that restored the shah of Iran to his throne,
secretly visited Egypt in 1952:

His mission, specifically, was first to attempt to organize a “peace¬
ful revolution” in Egypt wherein King Farouq himself would
supervise the liquidation of the old and its replacement by the new,
thereby defusing the revolutionary forces which CIA agents had
identified as much as two years earlier. 6

But, according to Copeland, Farouq was too “bird-brained” 7 and
corrupt to respond, preferring to engage in orgies and troll Cairo’s

98 ■ Devil’s Game

Red Light district in sunglasses than to take responsibility for Egypt.
Kim Roosevelt thus

. . . agreed to meet the officers whom the CIA had spotted as likely
leaders of the secret military society known to be plotting a coup.
This he did in March 1952, four months before Nasser’s coup. . . .
There were three such meetings, the third attended by one of
Nasser’s most trusted lieutenants. 8

Roosevelt returned to Washington to convince the U.S. government
that it must accept the removal of Farouq.

There is no way to corroborate Copeland’s account. Declassified
archives don’t provide any help, and no one else has stepped forward
to endorse Copeland’s specific assertions. Yet the United States ini¬
tially enjoyed generally good relations with the new Egyptian govern¬
ment. In his excellent book, Nasser's Blessed Movement, Joel Gordon
reports that declassified “records do substantiate charges of close
links between the U.S. embassy in Cairo and the new regime.” The
British, on the other hand, though resigned to following the U.S. lead,
seethed with anger at Washington, fearing that Nasser’s rise to power
threatened the Suez Canal, its bases, and its path to India. 9

But more was at stake than the remnants of the British Empire. The
emergence of Nasser was an existential threat to the oil kingdoms—to
Saudi Arabia, to Iraq, and to the British-owned sheikhs in the Gulf.
The British, and then the Anglo-Americans, opposed Nasser not
because he was a communist, or because he was susceptible to commu¬
nist influence; in fact, Nasser suppressed the Egyptian left and the
various communist parties vigorously. In addition, the Egyptian com¬
munists were poorly organized and divided, with support primarily
among the intelligentsia, and had no chance of taking power except as
a minority stakeholder in a Wafd-led nationalist government. What
was intolerable to London and Washington (and to Paris, too, until
1956) was that Nasser refused to be controlled, was adept at playing
the superpowers off against each other, and inspired loyalty among
Arabs outside of Egypt, including those sitting on top of the oil.

What especially worried London and Washington was the idea

The War against Nasser and Mossadegh • 99

that Nasser might succeed in unifying Egypt and Saudi Arabia, thus
creating a major Arab power. One of the ironies of the Arab world is
that Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, which have historically
been the centers of Arab learning and political movements, have no
oil. On the other hand, except for Iraq and non-Arab Iran, the oil
states—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain,
Qatar—have tiny populations and no intellectual tradition (except
ultra-orthodox Islamic theology), and are ruled by royal kleptocracies
whose legitimacy is nil and whose existence depends on outside mili¬
tary protection. Most Arabs are aware that both the monarchies
themselves, and the artificial borders that demarcate their states, were
designed by imperialists seeking to build fences around oil wells in the
1920s. From a strategic standpoint, the Arabs would gain much by
marrying the sophistication and manpower of the urban Arab coun¬
tries (including Iraq) with the oil wealth of the desert kingdoms. At
the center of that idea lies Egypt, with its tens of millions of people,
and Saudi Arabia, with 200 billion barrels of oil. Underlying the rhet¬
oric of secular pan-Arabism is the reality that uniting Cairo and
Riyadh would create a vastly important new Arab center of gravity
with worldwide influence.

So, after its initial flirtation with Nasser, the United States—led by
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA director
Allen Dulles—lined up with London against Arab nationalism. British
prime minister Anthony Eden, who had been violently anti-Nasser all
along, considered a British-sponsored coup d’etat in Cairo as early as
1953. The only political force in Egypt that could mount a challenge
to Nasser—except for the army—was the Muslim Brotherhood,
which had hundreds of thousands of followers. The Brotherhood also
had the sympathy of some Egyptian officers, including Brigadier Gen¬
eral Mohammed Naguib, a longtime Muslim Brotherhood fellow
traveler who was a conservative member of Nasser’s Free Officers
movement. In 1952, after the officers’ coup toppled the king, Naguib
was named president and prime minister of Egypt, with Nasser as
deputy prime minister. Behind the scenes, Nasser was the real power.

William Lakeland, the [U.S.] embassy’s political officer, realized
almost immediately that Naguib was only Nasser’s front man,” wrote

[oo • Devil’s Game

Miles Copeland. “While the Egyptian public and the outside world
were cheering Naguib, the embassy, through Lakeland, had begun to
deal with Nasser as the one who really made the decisions.” 10 But
Naguib, though less powerful than Nasser, had close ties to Hassan
Ismail al-Hudaybi, the man who had succeeded Hassan al-Banna as
the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. Ultimately, a power struggle
between Nasser and Naguib would develop, and Naguib—with
British support—would reach out to the Brotherhood as his chief ally.

Nasser’s own early relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood was
tricky and nuanced." On taking power in 1952, the Free Officers
were very careful not to alienate the Muslim Brothers. Several mem¬
bers of the officers’ movement were members, and most of them,
including Nasser, had extensive contacts with the organization going
back to the 1940s. At the start the military junta faced a diverse coali¬
tion of opponents, including the Wafd and the left, the monarchists,
the fascist Young Egypt party, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Nasser,
who personally oversaw the military’s delicate relationship with the
Brotherhood, decided at first to co-opt and neutralize the group
rather than confront it. When the new Egyptian regime banned politi¬
cal parties in 1953, it exempted the Brotherhood.

There was, however, little chance that Nasser and the Muslim
Brotherhood would ever see eye to eye. The Brotherhood wanted an
Islamic society, Nasser a secular one. Perhaps even more important,
Nasser wanted reforms, including land reform and educational
changes, that the Muslim Brotherhood bitterly opposed. In conversa¬
tions with U.S. ambassador Jefferson Caffery—the same Caffery who
recommended that the Brothers’ Said Ramadan visit Princeton and
the White House in 1953—Hudaybi, the Brotherhood’s chieftain,
said that he “would be glad to see several of the [Free Officers] ‘elimi¬
nated.’ ” 12 At around the same time, a senior British diplomat, Trefor
Evans, the “oriental counselor” at the British embassy in Cairo, held
at least one meeting with Hassan Ismail al-Hudaybi, the supreme
guide of the Muslim Brotherhood—a meeting later cited as treason by
Nasser when he cracked down on the organization. Both British and
American officials maintained an ongoing relationship with the
group.

The War against Nasser and Mossadegh •

Nasser’s long-postponed showdown with the Muslim Brother¬
hood occurred in 1954. It coincided with rising British frustration
with the Egyptian leader during U.K.-Egypt negotiations over the
transfer of the Suez Canal and its bases to Egypt. While left-wing and
Labour politicians in England seemed willing to make a deal with
Nasser, the British right—led by unreconstructed imperialists such as
Winston Churchill—was nearly apoplectic about the Egyptian
upstart. From 1954 on, Anthony Eden, the British prime minister, was
demanding Nasser’s head. We are indebted to Stephen Dorril for the
story of Eden’s jihad against Nasser, which culminated in 1956. “MI6
had been considering a plan to assassinate President Nasser,” accord¬
ing to Dorril, who adds that in Cutting the Lion’s Tail, Nasser’s
adviser Mohammed Heikal published a copy of a telegram from CIA’s
James Eichelberger in London to CIA director Allen Dulles, citing dis¬
cussions with Ml6’s George Young. “He talked openly of assassinat¬
ing Nasser, instead of using a polite euphemism like ‘liquidating.’ He
said his people had been in contact with suitable elements in Egypt
and in the rest of the Arab world.” Eichelberger—like Copeland, part
of the CIA’s shrinking pro-Nasser faction—leaked what Young said to
Nasser! 13 A month later, Eden ranted: “What’s all this nonsense about
isolating Nasser or ‘neutralising’ him, as you call it? I want him
destroyed, can’t you understand? I want him murdered. . . . And I
don’t give a damn if there’s anarchy and chaos in Egypt.” 14

In the first months of 1954, the chaos nearly began, as the Muslim
Brotherhood and Nasser went to war. It started in January, when
Muslim Brotherhood thugs attacked pro-Nasser nationalist students
at Cairo University. Anwar Sadat, the former Muslim Brotherhood
member who had cast his lot with Nasser against his former organiza¬
tion, penned an article attacking groups that “traffic in religion.” Two
days later Nasser issued a decree outlawing the terrorist group, and he
blasted the Brotherhood as a pawn of the British. The decree banning
the organization said: “The revolution will never allow reactionary
corruption to recur in the name of religion.” 15 Declassified records
show that British intelligence was carefully reporting on Muslim
Brotherhood activity, noting “rumors of clashes between Brothers
and the police in the Delta and covert meetings held in Ismailia.” 16

:oz • Devil’s Game

According to Robert Baer, a former CIA covert operations special¬
ist, the CIA also endorsed the idea of using the Muslim Brotherhood
against Nasser. In Sleeping with the Devil, Baer describes the rough
outlines of a top secret U.S. effort:

At the bottom of it all was this dirty little secret in Washington:

The White House looked on the Brothers as a silent ally, a secret
weapon against (what else?) communism. This covert action
started in the 1950s with the Dulles brothers—Allen at the CIA
and John Foster at the State Department—when they approved
Saudi Arabia’s funding of Egypt’s Brothers against Nasser. As far
as Washington was concerned, Nasser was a communist. He’d
nationalized Egypt’s big-business industries, including the Suez
Canal. The logic of the cold war led to a clear conclusion: If Allah
agreed to fight on our side, fine. If Allah decided political assassi¬
nation was permissible, that was fine, too, as long as no one talked
about it in polite company.

Like any other truly effective covert action, this one was
strictly off the books. There was no CIA finding, no memorandum
notification to Congress. Not a penny came out of the Treasury to
fund it. In other words, no record. All the White House had to do
was give a wink and a nod to countries harboring the Muslim
Brothers, like Saudi Arabia and Jordan. 17

While both Britain and the United States were playing with fire,
mobilizing assassins from the Muslim Brotherhood against Nasser,
there is also evidence that the Brotherhood was cooperating with a
violent, assassination-prone Islamist group from Iran, the so-called
Devotees of Islam, one of whose founders was an Iranian ayatollah
who worked with the CIA in toppling Mossadegh. Bernard Lewis, a
former British intelligence officer and a leading Orientalist, noted that
the Brothers’ decision to engage in outright opposition to Nasser was
tied, in part, to its connections to the Devotees. It was, reported Lewis,
a visit to Cairo in 1954 by the leader of the Devotees of Islam that trig¬
gered the Muslim Brotherhood’s 1954 uprising against Nasser:

The same combination of idealism and violence, of piety and
terror, can be seen in the Persian organization known as the

The War against Nasser and Mossadegh • 103

Fidaiyan-i Islam —the devotees of Islam, which, significantly, bor¬
rows a term used by the medieval emissaries of the Old Man of the
Mountain. Though Shiites, they hold pan-Islamic opinions rather
similar to those of the Egyptian brothers, with whom they have
contacts. On March 7, 1951, one of their members shot and killed
Persian Prime Minister General Razmara. It was a visit of the
Fidat leader, Nawab Safavi, to Egypt in January, 1954, that
touched off the first serious and open clash between the Brother¬
hood and [Nasser’s] military regime. 18

The 1954 Brotherhood-Devotees link reveals the extent to which,
even in the 1950s, Islamic fundamentalism was truly international. It
reached across national borders in the Arab world, it connected Arab
fanatics with those in Pakistan, and it linked Sunni militants with Shi¬
ite ones in Iran and elsewhere. Even half a century later, it isn’t clear
whether the CIA understood the international scope and power of the
forces they were dealing with. Did they understand that the Islamic
right in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia, in Iran and elsewhere operated a
shadowy, worldwide fraternity—or did they believe that they could
pick and choose when and where to support the Islamic right, on a
case-by-case basis? The fact is that by the 1950s the Islamists had cre¬
ated a transnational organism, whose existence appeared to elude the
CIA for decades. Instead, American diplomats and CIA officials pre¬
ferred to see Islamic activists only in relation to the country in which
they were stationed.

During 1954, relations between Nasser and the Brothers grew
more tense. Though now officially outlawed, the Brotherhood still
maintained a powerful presence throughout the country. Nasser moved
first against Naguib. In a prolonged struggle during February and
March, Nasser marginalized Naguib, shunting him aside and deftly
neutralizing the Muslim Brotherhood in the process. In April, Nasser
brought to trial the first of several leading Brotherhood officials, and a
final confrontation with the organization seemed inevitable. The Egyp¬
tian police began watching the organization’s actions, even raiding its
mosques and imposing controls on sermons by radical imams. In Sep¬
tember, the Egyptian government stripped five Muslim Brotherhood
officials of their citizenship while they were on a mission to Syria.

04 * Devil’s Game

Among them was Said Ramadan, the Brotherhood’s chief ideologue.
The five men were attending a conference in Damascus at which they
organized Muslim Brotherhood members from Iraq, Jordan, and
Sudan to denounce Nasser. 19 Leading members of the Brotherhood,
including Hudaybi, went into hiding.

Finally, on October 26, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood
fired eight shots at Nasser. The facts surrounding the assassination
attempt are somewhat murky, but in most accounts the shots at
Nasser were fired at point-blank range by a Brotherhood member
who was immediately arrested. Was there a larger conspiracy? Were
the British putting the Brothers up to killing Nasser? Certainly, the
record shows, the idea wasn’t beyond Eden.

During the mid-1950s, in actions that foreshadowed the attempts
to kill Fidel Castro by John F. Kennedy’s CIA, the British hatched
innumerable schemes to murder the Egyptian leader, some of them
harebrained. They funneled money into Egypt to bribe Nasser’s doc¬
tor to poison him, concocted a plot to “inject lethal poison into some
popular Egyptian Kropje chocolates” destined for him, created a
James Bond-like “modified cigarette packet which fired a poisoned
dart,” and tried to “slip a poisoned pill into Nasser’s coffee.”
(Copeland, who learned about the latter scheme, says that he joked
with Nasser about it. “Turn your head, Gamal, and let me see if I can
put this poison in your coffee.”) 20 Yet all of this British skullduggery
was not funny, and it gives credence to the notion that the British may
have tried to use the Muslim Brotherhood’s veteran assassins, too.

Reprisals against the Muslim Brotherhood were swift and deadly.
More than a thousand Brothers were arrested; many were sentenced
to long prison terms, and six were hanged. Assets of the organization
were seized, and its offices and welfare centers taken over by govern¬
ment agencies. Naguib, with his credibility among the army fading
and his Brotherhood allies scattered, was ousted from the government
entirely in November, leading C. L. Sulzberger to describe him as
“Kerensky with a fez” in the New York Times . 21

To help round up the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading lights, Nasser
played a secret card, using a jujitsu-like maneuver against a clique of
former Nazis who had taken roost in Egypt after World War II. During

The War against Nasser and Mossadegh • 105

the war, many right-wing Islamists and Brotherhood activists—
including Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, who had
settled in Cairo—had intimate ties to the Nazis and to German intelli¬
gence. After the war, many former Nazis who escaped the Nuremberg
trials and other dragnets fled to safe havens around the world, and
Egypt in the 1940s was particularly welcoming. By then, the CIA and
MI6 were fast recruiting former Nazis to the Cold War struggle
against the Soviet Union. Working with Reinhard Gehlen, the former
Nazi intelligence chief, the CIA and the U.S. army helped to set up the
famous Gehlen Organization, the association of ex-Nazi spies that
was used by James Critchfield of the CIA as the core of the West Ger¬
man intelligence system. Some of them, no doubt, infiltrated Egypt on
behalf of either U.S. or British intelligence; others were simply migrat¬
ing to what they hoped was a hospitable environment.

One of the ex-Nazis who ended up in Egypt was Franz Buensch, a
German whose claim to fame was the publication of an anti-Semitic
tract called Sexual Habits of the Jews, and it was Buensch that Nasser
manipulated in order to ferret out Brotherhood plotters. According to
Miles Copeland, Buensch proposed an outlandish scheme to use for¬
mer Nazis to organize an international Islamic underground in con¬
junction with the Muslim Brotherhood. Nasser feigned interest in the
gambit, then, says Copeland, had his security chief use it to round up
Muslim Brotherhood members:

Buensch . . . did develop one project that quickly gained Egyptian
interest: a plan to collect Nazi diehards from their various hiding
places all over the world (Argentina, Brazil, Ireland, Spain, etc.)
and give them Islamic names, join them to “underground assets”
developed by Egypt during the Second World War, build a subver¬
sive intelligence org combining the best in German and Egyptian
talent, and “put it at the disposal” of Gamal Abdel Nasser for his
international war against communism and imperialism.

The plan was presented to Saad Afraq, the General Intelli¬
gence Agency officer then responsible for administration and sur¬
veillance of the Germans. Saad, whose genial manner covered one
of the shrewdest brains in Egypt, affected great interest in the
plan, but insisted that he must hear much more about these

io 6 • Devil’s Game

“underground assets.” Buensch, who until then had been sulking
at Egyptian indifference to his pet subject, began to feel that at last
he was being appreciated and that perhaps he was on to some¬
thing big. With Saad Afraq’s encouragement, he produced all the
information on the subject he could remember, then pumped other
members of the German colony for what they remembered. The
result was enough evidence to hang half the Moslem Brotherhood,
plus enough leads to keep Egyptian security officers busy for the
next two years establishing the extent of influence of the organiza¬
tion not only in Egypt but throughout the Arab world. 22

In 1954, Egypt and the United Kingdom had signed an agreement
over the Suez Canal and British military basing rights. It was short¬
lived. In 1956, Great Britain, France, and Israel concocted a plot
against Egypt aimed at toppling Nasser and seizing control of the
Suez Canal—a conspiracy in which they enlisted the Muslim Brother¬
hood. When the gathering British-Egyptian showdown erupted in
1956, the organization had been largely dismantled and its members
jailed, driven into exile, or forced underground in Egypt. But that
didn’t stop London from reaching out to its old allies. The story of
Suez has been told countless times: how Nasser sought U.S. financial
help to build the Aswan Dam and was rebuffed insultingly; how the
United States refused to sell arms to Egypt; how the Soviet Union
stepped in to supply aid and sell Czech arms to Nasser; how the
British stonewalled negotiations about handing over the canal; and
how London and Paris plotted with Israel to go to war. Eden’s hatred
for Nasser had reached fever pitch. Less well known, however, is the
fact that as the plot unfolded, the British held secret powwows with
the Muslim Brotherhood in Geneva. According to Dorril, two British
spooks, Col. Neil McLean and Julian Amery, helped MI6 organize a
clandestine anti-Nasser opposition in the south of France and in
Switzerland. “They also went so far as to make contact in Geneva,
where the MI6 head of station was Norman Darbyshire, with mem¬
bers of the Muslim Brotherhood, informing only MI6 of this
demarche which they kept secret from the rest of the Suez Group
[which was planning the military operation]. Amery forwarded vari¬
ous names to [Selwyn] Lloyd,” the British foreign secretary. 23 The

The War against Nasser and Mossadegh • 107

exact nature of Ml6’s contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe
during this period is not known, but it may have ranged from organiz¬
ing a secret assassination effort to assembling a secret government-in-
exile to replace Nasser after the Suez war.

The Anglo-French plot that unfolded in 1956 reads like a
nineteenth-century imperialist scheme. London and Paris arranged
for Israel to launch an unprovoked war against Egypt. According to
the conspiracy, the British and French would wait a decent interval,
perhaps some days, and then intervene militarily to impose a truce on
Egypt and Israel, meanwhile seizing the Suez Canal in the process.
Nasser, they hoped, would fall—perhaps be overthrown. And the
Muslim Brotherhood, though weakened, was waiting in the wings. In
the end, President Eisenhower—fearing that the Soviet Union would
reap untold rewards by capitalizing on the Anglo-French-Israeli
aggression—joined with other nations to foil the plot. For a time, it
seemed as if the United States had an opportunity once again to build
a positive relationship with Nasser. Almost immediately, however, the
opportunity was lost, and the Dulles brothers went back to the usual
pattern of confronting both Nasser and Arab nationalism.

There were those State Department and CIA officials who were
dismayed by the administration’s reflexively anti-Nasser position.
One of those was Copeland, who was an unabashed admirer of
Nasser. Wrote Copeland, mixing praise with tongue-in-cheek scold¬
ing, “He is one of the most courageous, most incorruptible, most
unprincipled, and in his way, most humanitarian national leaders I
have ever met.” 24 Yet as the 1950s wore on, Copeland became more
and more a minority voice, as Washington Cold Warriors turned
Nasser into the devil incarnate. The State Department’s Arabists were
“soft on Nasser,” Copeland says, but “this tendency was more than
offset by the opposition of the commercial community,” especially
the big U.S. oil companies and banks. As the tide turned against
Copeland’s view of Nasser, he was pulled aside by a joking CIA col¬
league visiting Cairo. “I think we’ve finally got you Nasser lovers on
the run,” he said. In 1954, Copeland notes ruefully, the CIA chief in
Cairo cabled Washington that it should persuade Israel to emphasize
“the Brotherhood’s commendable capability to overthrow Nasser.” 25

:o8 • Devil’s Game

John Voll, a noted specialist on Islam, says matter-of-factly that
CIA support for the Muslim Brotherhood during the Cold War was
the right thing to do. “It was a smart intelligence vehicle,” says Voll.
“It was the only alternative to Nasser. The Communist Party in Egypt
was a nonstarter. In terms of intelligence and policy planning we
would have been stupid not to have had a relationship with them.” 26

In retrospect, however, it is hard to think of anything more stupid.
The United States didn’t need an alternative to Nasser—it ought to
have embraced him, and helped him undermine the Islamic right.
Instead, U.S. policy hardened against Nasser, joined the Saudi royals
and their Islamic fundamentalist allies, and launched a decades-long
effort to use political Islam as a cornerstone of American influence in
the Middle East.

Moreover, the ideological rigidity of American foreign policy elites
wasn’t confined to Egypt. While the U.S. sought to undermine Nasser,
it took on another regional nationalist, Prime Minister Mohammed
Mossadegh of Iran. That effort would culminate in America’s most
famous CIA covert operation, the 1953 coup d’etat in Iran—and, as
in Egypt, right-wing Islamists would play a prominent role.

The CIA and Khomeini’s Godfather

It is one of the ironies in regard to both Nasser and Mossadegh that
both men had a modicum of American support during their initial rise
to power, until the exigencies of the Cold War turned U.S. policy deci¬
sively against them. At first, the United States tentatively supported
the Iranian nationalists led by Mossadegh, partly out of Washington’s
early belief that liberal Third World nationalists might be able to
modernize their nations while, at the same time, keeping them in the
Western orbit. But the Eisenhower administration wasn’t buying it. Its
view was: You are either with us—that is. Third World leaders had to
allow military bases, join alliances, and make economic concessions
while implementing free-market policies—or you were against us. In
a less polarized world Mossadegh, like Nasser, might have been able
to reach a long-term accommodation with Washington.

The War against Nasser and Mossadegh • 109

As in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood was mobilized against
Nasser, Iran’s forces of radical political Islam were cynically used
against Mossadegh. The very same cleric-led, right-wing Islamists that
toppled the shah in 1979 were paid by the CIA in 1953 to support him.

Mossadegh, an Iranian lawyer educated in Paris and Switzerland,
was a complex figure who was a fixture in Iranian politics for decades
before 1953, having served in Iran’s parliament under the pre-Pahlavi
Qajar dynasty in 1915 and as foreign minister in 192.4. His associa¬
tion with the earlier line of Iranian kings set him at odds with Reza
Pahlavi and his son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. In 1944, he was
elected to parliament again, as a strong advocate of nationalizing
Iran’s oil industry, then under the grip of what is today British Petro¬
leum. Mossadegh became chairman of the parliament’s oil com¬
mission, and he created a coalition political movement, called the
National Front. After the assassination of General Ali Razmara in
1951, the shah felt compelled to name Mossadegh to succeed Razmara
as prime minister. But Mossadegh pushed through the nationalization
of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC). It was a catastrophic
blow to England; APOC, later Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and then
British Petroleum, was the pride and joy of Britain’s imperial assets,
having gotten its start during World War I as the special project of
Winston Churchill, who saw Persian oil as a source of fuel for the
worldwide British navy. Mossadegh instantly became a hated man in
London, and he clashed bitterly with the shah, whose own nationalist
impulses were subordinate to his desire to maintain his throne and
to have good relations with London and Washington. At first, many
of Iran’s most political ayatollahs participated in the National Front,
but they left it and joined the CIA-sponsored campaign against
Mossadegh, which resulted in a military coup d’etat in August 1953.
The shah, who had fled the country, was restored to the Peacock
Throne—and the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry was annulled.
In the process, the United States muscled in on Iranian oil: 40 percent
of the share in the new consortium was given to five big American oil
companies, and BP’s share was reduced.

The story of the coup, run jointly by the CIA and MI6, has been
told many times. Almost never reported, however, is the fact that the

:o • Devil’s Game

two intelligence agencies worked closely with Iran’s clergy, the ulema,
to weaken and ultimately to overthrow Mossadegh. A critical role was
played by street mobs, bought and paid for by the CIA and mobil¬
ized by rabble rousers tied to the ulema, who demanded the ouster
of the prime minister and the return of the shah. Ayatollah Seyyed
Abolqassem Kashani, the chief representative of the Muslim Brother¬
hood in Iran and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s mentor and predeces¬
sor as Iran’s leading Islamist cleric, was a central figure in the campaign.

According to former Iranian government officials, Khomeini
himself, then no more than an obscure, middle-aged mullah and a fol¬
lower of Kashani’s, took part in the CIA-organized, pro-shah demon¬
strations against Mossadegh. 27 It is a supreme irony. Twenty-five
years later, in 1978, that same Khomeini would once again lead a reli¬
gious mob, this time to unseat the shah and create the Islamic Repub¬
lic of Iran.

Ayatollah Abolqassem Kashani (1882.-1962,) was Khomeini’s god¬
father. He was quintessentially political, having started his political
career in the 1920s by serving in the Iranian parliament. In Iran, the
clergy had a reputation for stopping at nothing to protect their status.
In the 1920s, that meant that the establishment ulema would vocifer¬
ously veto the creation of an Iranian republic. Reza Pahlavi, the mili¬
tary strongman who took control of Iran in the early 1920s, admired
Kemal Ataturk, the secular Turkish republican leader, and wanted to
declare Iran a republic on the Turkish model. But the mullahs, includ¬
ing Kashani, feared that a secular republic would fatally undermine
their power, and so they demanded a monarchy. Princess Ashraf
Pahlavi, the shah’s twin sister, wrote in her memoirs about the clergy’s
resistance to republicanism: “My father favored a republic like that of
Turkey, and he proposed this idea to the leading Shiite mullahs. But at
a meeting in the holy city of Qom, the clergy—staunch supporters of
the feudal system, the monarchy, and all tradition representing the
status quo—told my father they would oppose any plan for a repub¬
lic.” 28 Not ready to challenge the powerful religious establishment,
Reza abandoned the idea of a republic and proclaimed himself king.
The young Kashani was one of the kingmakers.

Over the next twenty years, Kashani would have two enemies: the

The War against Nasser and Mossadegh •

communists and the shah. Like Islamists everywhere, the ulema feared
and hared the communists and their Tudeh Party, and used their reli¬
gious muscle against the left. But for the mullahs, the real threat to
their power in Iran came from the shah, who disdained the clergy as
medieval-minded relics opposed to his efforts to modernize the coun¬
try. Beginning in the 1930s, following the Ataturk model, the shah
acted forcefully against the clergy. He brought the backward sharia
courts under state control and nationalized some of the clergy’s reli¬
gious endowments, reducing the clergy’s financial power and remov¬
ing an important source of their income. He instituted a Western form
of dress, banning Islamic garb, took control of marriage and divorce
proceedings, and battled the Islamists over the emancipation of
women. The shah ordered that public places be open to women and
outlawed the veil and the oppressive chador. In 1939, the shah
banned the horrific practice of self-flagellation, a mutilating ritual
practiced by some fundamentalist Shiites. 29 The measures were wel¬
comed by Iran’s modernists, but the clergy fumed. Often outflanked
by the shah, Kashani quietly built up political power.

Just as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the late 1940s carried
out acts of terrorism, in Iran, Kashani and his ilk fomented terrorist
violence against the shah. In 1945, Kashani helped found the unoffi¬
cial Iranian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Devotees of
Islam, led by a radical mullah named Navab Safavi. A series of terror¬
ist attacks by Kashani’s movement included a 1949 assassination
attempt against the shah, carried out by a member of the Islamist
underground affiliated to a publication called The Flag of Islam. In
1950, one of the Devotees of Islam assassinated Abdul Hussein Hajir,
the shah’s minister of court, and in 1951 another Devotee murdered
the prime minister, General Ali Razmara, just as Iran was renegotiat¬
ing the rights to its oil resources with London. Razmara, said the shah
in his memoirs, “had the agreement with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Com¬
pany in his pocket when he died.” 30 Most educated Iranians, from the
shah on down, suspected the British of having ties to Iran’s clergy and
to the Islamist movement, if not to the actual acts of terrorism.

“The British wanted to keep up their empire, and the best way to do
that was to divide and rule,” says Fereydoun Hoveyda, who served as

ii • Devil’s Game

Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations until the 1979 revolution, and
whose brother, Amir Abbas Hoveyda, Iran’s prime minister in the
1970s, was executed by the Khomeini regime. “The British were play¬
ing all sides. They were dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt
and the mullahs in Iran, but at the same time they were dealing with the
army and the royal families.” He says that the British saw the Islamists
as just another tool through which their power could be extended:

They had financial deals with the mullahs. They would find the
most important ones and they would help them. And the mullahs
were smart: they knew that the British were the most important
power in the world. It was also about money. The British would
bring suitcases full of cash and give it to these people. For example,
people in the bazaar, the wealthy merchants, would each have
their own ayatollah that they would finance. And that’s what the
British were doing. 31

Ashraf, in her memoirs, wrote about Britain’s unholy ties to the clergy
in Iran:

Many influential clergymen formed alliances with representatives
of foreign powers, most often the British, and there was in fact a
standing joke in Persia that said if you picked up a clergyman’s
beard, you would see the words “Made in England” stamped on
the other side. These Shiite mullahs exercised a powerful influence
over the minds of the masses. At times the voice of God seemed to
be speaking with a British or Russian accent. It was difficult for
the peasant to decipher where religion left off and politics began. 32

Ashraf added that after World War II, London bolstered the Islamic
right as part of its Cold War strategy for the region. “With the encour¬
agement of the British, who saw the mullahs as an effective counter¬
force to the Communists, the elements of the extreme religious right
were starting to surface again, after years of being suppressed.” 33

The shah himself, in memoirs written just before his death in exile,
notes that the man who killed his minister of court in 1950, Fakhr Arai,
had ties both to the Devotees of Islam and to the British. “Arai was

The War against Nasser and Mossadegh • 113

involved with an ultraconservative religious group that was comprised
of the most backward religious fanatics,” he wrote, adding that he
may also have had indirect ties to the British embassy in Teheran.
“The British had their fingers in strange pies. The British had ties to
the most reactionary clergy in the country.” 34

By the early 1950s, Britain’s stake in Iran was threatened. Since
World War I, the British had enjoyed exclusive rights to Iran’s oil. So
it wasn’t surprising when the United States at first viewed Mossadegh
favorably. Mossadegh was seeking to renegotiate the Iran-U.K. oil
agreement on terms more favorable to Teheran, and the British were
rattling swords and making threats. Washington, at odds with Lon¬
don over Middle East oil, provided aid and sold arms to Mossadegh’s
government and, in 1951, Mossadegh visited Washington. “President
Truman sent a note imploring the British not to invade Iran,” wrote a
leading historian. 35 But when Mossadegh rejected an American plan
to allow U.S. oil companies into Iran, the United States switched
course, and turned against Mossadegh. Suddenly, the fledgling CIA
and Britain’s MI6 joined together in a plot to topple Mossadegh.
Enter Kashani.

Until 1952, Kashani posed as an ally of Mossadegh’s in the National
Front, the nationalist coalition that governed Iran under the shah. But
as the United States and the British moved against Mossadegh, Kashani
abandoned him and moved into opposition. Kashani maintained covert
ties to the Islamist-terrorist underground, but in public he adroitly dis¬
tanced himself from the Devotees of Islam and their ilk. The CIA was
well aware of Kashani’s power. In a report in October 1952, “Prospects
for Survival of Mossadeq Regime in Iran,” the CIA noted:

Since Mossadeq returned to power in July 1952 there have been
continuous reports of plots to overthrow him. Kashani and army
officers are frequently mentioned as leaders. ... A contest in the
streets between the forces supporting Mossadeq and Kashani
would be bitter and destructive. 36

Among the forces that could be mobilized by Kashani, the CIA
included “the Bazaar mobs and the bands organized by his son” and

4 • Devil’s Game

“the Fedayan terrorist organization of Moslem extremists.” Even as
that report was being written by the CIA’s analysts, the CIA’s covert-
operations unit was already working with Kashani to mobilize his
forces and to provoke exactly that “contest in the streets.” In a 1952
State Department memo, one of Kashani’s allies is quoted predicting
violence, saying that it “might be necessary ... to punish the commu¬
nists physically.” 37

In 1952-53, the CIA and MI6 approached Kashani and half a
dozen other key Iranian religious leaders, offering money and other
inducements to break with Mossadegh and support the shah. “Reli¬
gious leaders were encouraged with funding to adopt a more funda¬
mentalist line and break with Mossadeq,” according to Dorril. 38 The
British took the lead, using its vast intelligence network in Iran, includ¬
ing the resources of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which maintained
its own, private secret service, the Central Information Bureau. The
British, of course, were active in covert operations against Mossadegh
long before the United States came on board, but the Americans report¬
edly had the chief pipeline to Kashani. Ann Lambton, a professor at
Oxford’s School of Oriental and African Studies and a former British
intelligence officer, played a behind-the-scenes role in the action to
undermine Mossadegh and, in a report at the time, she noted that
“Kashani has received large sums of money from somewhere” and
noted that it may have been coming from the CIA. 39

From 1946 to 1953, the man who ran U.S. covert operations in
Iran was John Waller, a veteran of the American clandestine service
who joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II
and then served with the CIA until the 1970s. He spent much of
World War II in Cairo and Teheran and as a very young man was
given a leading responsibility. “Here I was,” Waller recalls, “head of
counterespionage for the Middle East at age nineteen.” In 1946,
barely into his twenties, he opened the first American intelligence sta¬
tion in postwar Iran, recruiting former German spies to assist the
United States in the Cold War and working with Iran’s tribal chief¬
tains, including the Qashqai, the Bakhtiari, and the Kurds.

“We, in the field, liked Mossadegh,” says Waller, now in his eight¬
ies. “In fact, his niece married a [CIA] case officer.” But soon the

The War against Nasser and Mossadegh • 115

Americans began to side with the British, who despised Mossadegh.
“We had an obligation to our old ally, the British, and oil was an
issue.” According to Waller, one of the main props holding up
Mossadegh were the mullahs and the bazaar. “The bazaar and the
mullahs were very, very close. And the mullahs had control of the
people, especially the lower classes,” he says. 40

Of all of the religious leaders, the most important was Kashani,
says Waller, who as the CIA station chief, developed a warm relation¬
ship with the fiery ayatollah during the seven years that he was sta¬
tioned in Iran. “I did a portrait of Mullah Kashani, in pastels,” Waller
recalls, with a smile. “Or, I should say, Ayatollah Kashani. He sat for
me for a bit, and I finished it from photographs.” Waller insists that
Kashani never became a full-fledged CIA “agent”—“you don’t make
an ayatollah your agent,” he says—but adds that the United States
and the British had several important agents in the anti-Mossadegh
coalition, “some of whom were extremely adroit at handling both the
bazaar and the mullahs.” And Waller says:

It was obvious that the clergy were important.... Kashani told me
why he was dropping out of the Mossadegh coalition. Because the
Tudeh Parry was being tolerated by Mossadegh. They were synony¬
mous with the Russians, and religious men don’t like communism.

Kashani was the head man of his god, which gave him politi¬
cal power. It’s like the Christian right here. He was the ayatollah,
the Khomeini of the day. He had power over the church. He had
power over the poor people, which was most of the people in the
southern part of the city. And, from time immemorial, the mullahs
were close to the bazaaris.

Did the CIA fund Kashani directly? “Yes,” according to Waller. “It
was money both to Kashani and to his chosen instruments, money to
finance his communication channels, pamphleteering, and so on to
the people in south Teheran.” Waller adds, with a wry grin, that even
ayatollahs are, well, corruptible. Choosing his words carefully, he
says, “I think he was truly religious, but forgive me for being a cynic.
Being religious doesn’t distract you from political or commercial real¬
ity, or from sex.”

6 • Devil’s Game

With Kashani on board, the CIA and MI6 found it easier to stage
street riots and demonstrations against Mossadegh and against the
communists. Kashani’s power among the masses of Teheran’s slums
and in the mosques was considerable. The military coup that ousted
Mossadegh was coupled with demonstrations financed by the CIA,
using the crowds loyal to Kashani and organized by the clergy and by
gangs of thugs in the pay of mobsters. Waller returned to Washington
to oversee the coup d’etat from headquarters, and in the field the leg¬
endary Kermit Roosevelt ran the operation on the ground. Two Iran¬
ian brothers, the “Boscoes,” under CIA control, and three other
Iranian brothers, the Rashidians, under MI6 control, joined with
Shaaban Jaafari, a famous Iranian athlete and performer, to work
with Kashani in assembling the mobs. “One of our agents was a man
called ‘the Brainless One,’ ” recalls Waller. “He was a sports hero, a
juggler—getting him to work with us was like getting Babe Ruth. He
could get a mob together fast. We paid for those.”

“Through the Rashidians,” wrote Dorril, the CIA and MI6 “estab¬
lished contact with conservative clerics such as Ayatollahs Borujerdi
and Behbehani, who feared that Mossadeq’s ‘leftist advances were
endangering national security,’ and dissident mullahs from the
National Front, Kashani and Makki, who claimed that the ministries
were full of ‘Kremlin-controlled atheists.’” 41 Recalls Waller, “At the
time Islam hadn’t raised its head in an organized way. But communism
and Islam have never been compatible.” 42

An important part of the CIA’s work in Iran in the early 1950s
involved efforts to mobilize Iranian religious sentiment against the
USSR. It came during a time when the United States was experiment¬
ing with Islamist anti-communist fervor in Egypt, Pakistan, and else¬
where. In Iran, much of the CIA’s focus was directed against the
communist Tudeh Party, although the Tudeh was never really a seri¬
ous threat. Mossadegh was no communist, having come to power in
part with U.S. support. But once he was placed on Washington’s ene¬
mies list, the CIA went all-out to discredit him by portraying him as
communist-controlled, especially in propaganda aimed at the mul¬
lahs. The propaganda effort was coordinated by two CIA officers
whom we shall meet later, Donald Wilber and Richard Cottam.

The War against Nasser and Mossadegh • 117

At times, the propaganda was heavy-handed:

The next move was to bring out the psychological warfare assets.

“In a lurid effort to totally discredit the left,” Ayatollah Behbehani,
who received money from the Americans, sent out letters bearing
the insignia of the Tudeh Party, and containing “grisly threats”
written in red ink “to hang all the mullahs from the lampposts of
various Iranian cities.” 43

According to Dorril, the CIA used journalists Kenneth Love of the
New York Times and Don Schwind of the Associated Press as agents
to circulate their propaganda. 44 Not only did the CIA use ayatollahs
such as Behbehani to spread falsified threats from the Tudeh about
hanging mullahs, but it paid violent agents provocateurs to rile up
Iran’s religious community. The CIA and MI6 paid thugs and rabble-
rousers to pose as Tudeh followers in violent street demonstrations
attacking Iran’s Shiite establishment:

The mobs came out onto the streets.... A key aspect of the plot
was to portray the mobs as supporters of the Tudeh Party in order
to provide a suitable pretext for the coup and the resumption of
power by the shah. [MI6 agents] hired a fake Tudeh crowd, com¬
prising an unusual mixture of pan-Iranians and Tudeh members,
paid for with fifty thousand dollars given to them by a CIA officer.
Richard Cottam observed that agents working on behalf of the
British “saw the opportunity and sent the people we had under our
control into the streets to act as if they were Tudeh. They were more
than just provocateurs, they were shock troops, who acted as if they
were Tudeh people throwing rocks at mosques and [mullahs].”
“The purpose” [another writer said], “was to frighten a majority of
Iranians into believing that a victory for Mossadeq would be a vic¬
tory for the Tudeh, the Soviet Union, and irreligion.” 45

After the restoration of the shah, efforts were made to put the
Islamist genie back in the bottle. But the force of political Islam,
repressed in Iran since the 1920s, had now revived, thanks in part to
the assistance of the CIA and MI6. It would not be so easy to quiet it
down again, and in a very literal sense the forces that toppled the shah

8 • Devil’s Game

in 1979 were exactly those unleashed to return him to power in 1953.
In the 1950s, the shah and his SAVAK secret service strove mightily to
keep the Islamists in check and to buy off, corrupt, or otherwise neu¬
tralize the medieval mullahs, including Khomeini. “During the shah’s
reign, the government paid the clergy, too,” says Fereydoun Hoveyda,
the former Iranian UN ambassador, whose brother served as the
shah’s prime minister for many years. “Some of the money came from
my brother, and some of it came from SAVAK,” he says. “And SAVAK
had its own people in the clergy.” 46 Yet the shah preferred to dismiss
Islam as a relic of the past. And so when the movement against the
shah began in earnest in the mid-1970s, neither the shah nor most of
his sycophantic aides would recognize it for what it was.

After 1953, Kashani gradually faded from view. But his acolyte
would introduce a virulent new strain of political Islam. He was just
beginning his rise to power.

The 1940s and 1950s were still formative years for Khomeini. His
political views were in flux, although Khomeini’s writings during World
War II reflected distaste for the “dark dictatorship” of Reza Shah, whose
reign ended when he was deposed in 1941. 47 By instinct, Khomeini was
prone to denounce the compliant, Shiite clerical establishment in Iran.
He gravitated toward Kashani, Navab Safavi, and the Devotees of
Islam, and began to refine his radical views. “Khomeini’s own political
position during this period was somewhere between that of the clerical
establishment and the Fedaiyan ,” wrote Khomeini’s biographer, Baqer
Moin. He supported the fairly conservative Ayatollah Borujerdi, but

he was radically opposed to secularism, believed adamantly in the
rule of the sharia, and had activist tendencies. He had absorbed, in
other words, some of the ideas of the Fedaiyan perhaps in the
course of conversations with Navvab Safavi who, according to the
latter’s widow, was a frequent visitor to Khomeini’s home. 48

Kashani began to act as Khomeini’s mentor at this point.

Another indication of the Khomeini’s political ideas at the time
was his admiration for Ayatollah Abolqassem Kashani (i88z-
1962), who from 1945 was closely linked to the Fedaiyan-e

The War against Nasser and Mossadegh • 119

Islam. . . . Khomeini was a frequent visitor to Kashani’s home and
admired his courage and stamina. He shared his views on many
issues such as anti-colonialism, Islamic universalism, political
activism, and populism. 49

During the 1953 coup, Khomeini was involved with the terrorist-
inclined Devotees of Islam, even after Kashani decided to keep his
distance. Yet Khomeini and Kashani remained close, and Khomeini
followed Kashani’s advice to break with Mossadegh and support the
return of the shah. Still, Khomeini maintained ties to the Devotees,
and he intervened in a vain effort to prevent the execution of Navab
Safavi in the mid-1950s. But the calculating ayatollah learned a great
deal from his experience in 1953. Kashani and the Devotees, he felt,
were too political, and lost the all-important connection with the
establishment ulema in the holy city of Qom. Borujerdi, on the other
hand, though admired by Khomeini for his religious scholarship, was
too distant from politics. Repairing to Qom, Khomeini spent the next
ten years seeking to unite the political and the religious elements of
Iran’s Shiite movement. He would next explode onto the scene in
1963-64, mounting a frontal challenge to the shah.

The United States, meanwhile, would forget all about Islam in Iran.
The shah was reinstalled, and secure. Washington had won a healthy
chunk of the Iranian oil industry for U.S. oil companies, and the United
States was busily helping the shah build his army, his police force, and
his much-feared intelligence service, the SAVAK. Despite the help of
some of the mullahs in toppling Mossadegh, the imperial shah was in
no mood to share power with anyone—liberals, businessmen, or clergy.
So the Islamists seethed and simmered beneath him, unnoticed.

The story of political Islam and its burgeoning alliance with the
United States now shifted to the Arab world. Nasser, victorious after
the Suez War of 1956 and unbowed, was presenting an ever more
serious challenge to the Cold War ideologues of the Eisenhower
administration. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood was crushed and forced
into exile. To stop Nasser, and to support anti-communist and anti¬
nationalist forces across the entire Arab world, the United States
turned to Saudi Arabia.

THE KING OF ALL ISLAM

“The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear cut
stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us
wonder at the possibility that there may be something we are
missing.”

—Gamal Abdel Nasser, 1957

Dwight David Eisenhower was a good general, a modest
president, and a poor student of Islam.

In the immediate aftermath of Suez in 1956, after Ike had inter¬
vened to force Israel out of the Sinai and to undo the Anglo-French
conspiracy against Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, the United States
had a chance to improve relations with Nasser and Arab nationalism.
Instead, Eisenhower opted for an alliance with Saudi Arabia, making
the reactionary bastion of Islamic fundamentalism into America’s
chief ally in the Arab world. Until Nasser’s untimely death in 1970,
Saudi Arabia would serve as the bulwark of American influence in the
region. Like Franklin Roosevelt before him, who had announced
America’s claim to a strategic stake in Saudi oil, Eisenhower premised
friendly relations with Saudi Arabia on the importance of that coun¬
try’s petroleum wealth. But he expanded that relationship to include a
utilitarian alliance with Saudi Arabia’s benighted version of Islam. He
set a course that continued under the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon
administrations.

The King of All Islam • 12.1

The cornerstone of the administration’s Middle East policy was
the Eisenhower Doctrine. Echoing FDR, Ike proclaimed America’s
imperial goal of incorporating the Middle East into its permanent
sphere of influence. “The existing vacuum in the Middle East must be
filled by the United States before it is filled by Russia,” proclaimed
Ike. 1 In a message to Congress in January 1957, the president prom¬
ised that the United States would provide military and financial aid to
any Middle East countries “requesting such aid against overt aggres¬
sion from any nation controlled by international Communism.” 2 To
support the doctrine, Eisenhower invited King Saud to make an offi¬
cial state visit to Washington, emphasizing the importance of Saudi
Arabia by personally going out to the airport to meet the arriving
monarch. Ever grateful, the king endorsed the Eisenhower Doctrine.

It made sense to Eisenhower to view Saudi Arabia as the ultimate
prize, since one-fourth of the world’s oil lay beneath its sands. But
Eisenhower saw Saudi Arabia as more than a treasure to be protected.
Its role as the worldwide center of Islam suggested to Washington that
Islam—and Islamism—could be wielded as a sword against the Soviet
Union and against left-leaning nationalists like Nasser.

Eisenhower, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and Secretary of State
John Foster Dulles also sought to build an alliance with Saudi Ara¬
bia’s Wahhabi pan-Islamic movement, and Allen Dulles’s CIA secretly
encouraged Saudi Arabia to rebuild the Muslim Brotherhood against
Nasser. The president feared that the Soviet Union was trying to use
Egyptian president Nasser as the “head of an enormous Moslem con¬
federation.” Eisenhower recalled:

To check any movement in this direction we wanted to explore the
possibilities of building up King Saud as a counterweight to
Nasser. The king was a logical choice in this regard; he at least
professed anti-Communism, and he enjoyed, on religious grounds,
a high standing among all Arab nations. 3

It was a flawed idea. '

First, Eisenhower’s fear that the Soviet Union was on the verge of
making major gains in the Middle East was greatly exaggerated, and
the notion the USSR might try to embrace Islam was wildly off the

zz • Devil’s Game

mark. True, Moscow was trying to leapfrog the anti-communist
Northern Tier states of Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan. It did so by seek¬
ing influence in the Arab world, especially by cultivating ties to
Nasser and, after 1958, hoping that the revolutionary government of
Iraq would form a pan-Arab alliance with Egypt. But neither the
Egyptian nor the Iraqi government was pro-communist, and an
Egypt-Iraq alliance never emerged. 4 In addition, although the Soviet
Union may have looked with favor on pan-Arabism, with its empha¬
sis on nationalism, Moscow feared the rise of Islam within its own
borders in Central Asia and had no intention of fostering pan-Islam in
the Middle East. Yet none of this deterred Ike from pursuing a fateful
alliance with Riyadh.

Moreover, the notion of a U.S.-Saudi alliance built on Islam
ignored the fact that King Saud did not exactly enjoy much prestige
among Muslims. “Saud was weak, stupid, and corrupt, and he was
surrounded by Levantine courtiers,” says James Akins, a veteran U.S.
diplomat who served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the 1970s. 5
Besides the fact that he was hopelessly ignorant, with only the foggiest
understanding of the modern world, Saud was also widely seen as dis¬
solute, a sex addict, a drunk, and an all-around seeker of pleasure,
served by pimps and procurers of alcohol in ten lavish palaces. With
more than a hundred children 6 from an endless series of wives and
concubines, he was also, quite literally, the father of his country. All
in all, Saud was a less-than-solid foundation upon which to build a
Middle East empire, and especially not if one wished to appeal to the
conservatives in the Muslim world.

Yet as king of Saudi Arabia, whose territory included Mecca and
Medina, the holiest cities in Islam, Saud did embody worldwide pres¬
tige as custodian of Islam’s two shrines. As the Cold War matured,
Saudi Arabia’s role as the center of worldwide Islam would loom ever
larger in U.S. strategic thinking. Saud—cynically, some might say—
sought to portray himself as King of All Islam, and that was enough
for Eisenhower. “Arabia,” wrote Eisenhower, “is a country that con¬
tains the holy places of the Moslem world,” and he reasoned that “the
King could be built up as a spiritual leader.” 7 According to Nathan
Citino, the effort to build up King Saud as the leader of Islam was part

The King of All Islam • IZ3

of a joint strategy with Great Britain called “Omega.” Eisenhower
insisted that “our efforts should be toward separating the Saudi Ara¬
bians from the Egyptians.” 8 The president and the Dulles brothers
were even more encouraged when King Saud requested an Islamic
legal ruling from the Wahhabi clergy forbidding Muslims from
accepting aid from the Soviet bloc.

An effort to cobble together an “Islam strategy” emerged early in
1957. “Following the Saud-Eisenhower summit, the administration
continued to cultivate Islam as a bulwark against communism, and as
part of this policy it sought opportunities to overcome the social frag¬
mentation that afflicted the Middle East,” wrote Citino, who con¬
ducted a study of U.S.-Saudi relations during the Eisenhower years.
“In late January, the National Security Council staff established a
working committee on Islamic organizations that compiled a list of
Middle Eastern and North African social, cultural, and religious
groups, such as Sufi brotherhoods, which the United States Informa¬
tion Agency could target with propaganda.” 9

The CIA’s chief specialist on Islam at the time was none other than
Donald Wilber, the operative who had helped organize the 1953 coup
d’etat in Iran. “Wilber knew a lot about Islam,” says John Waller, a
retired CIA official who oversaw the coup from CIA headquarters. 10
But in his memoirs, Adventures in the Middle East, Wilber rather
modestly describes his work on Islam at the time:

One subject on which I was continually active was Islam and the
Muslims of the Middle East. For lack of anyone better qualified, I
became the Agency’s specialist on Islam. In the spring of 1957 I
was the CIA member of an inter-agency working group on Islam,
and then the co-author of the group study. In the field and at head¬
quarters I reviewed files and also collected publications and infor¬
mation on trips, and I authored several studies: “Islam in Iran,”
“Islam in Pakistan,” “Islam in Afghanistan,” [etc.]. More exhaus¬
tive than any published material, these were to serve as guidelines
for working with Muslim groups. 11

Wilber also included in his surveys research into the extent to which
the Central Asian Muslim population inside the Soviet Union could

2.4 • Devil’s Game

be mobilized against the USSR, and he coordinated propaganda
efforts in the late 1950s “exposing the Soviet Communist attitude
toward Islam.” 12

Eisenhower also sought input from non-CIA specialists on Islam,
including those within academia. Leading Orientalists, some of whom
had highlighted the Princeton colloquium in which the Muslim Broth¬
erhood’s Said Ramadan took part, were tapped for their expertise.
Wrote Citino:

The Eisenhower administration sponsored a conference in Wash¬
ington of leading historians of the Middle East, including, among
many others, the prominent Ottoman historian and later Univer¬
sity of Chicago professor Halil Inalcik. National Security Council
staffers routinely attended academic conferences and collected
scholarly papers on the contemporary Middle East. In one notable
example of Middle Eastern scholarship with Cold War ramifica¬
tions, filed away in the NSC staff papers at the Eisenhower Library,
Bernard Lewis explains how Naqshbandi Sufis living in the Cauca¬
sus region might be used as a fifth column inside the Soviet
empire. 13

Two close advisers of King Saud—Yusuf Yassin and Mohammed
Sorour Sabhan—conducted the negotiations with Secretary of State
John Foster Dulles. 14 Yassin, a Syrian from Latakia, on the coast of
the Mediterranean, was a sly, well-connected member of the king’s
entourage who had first come to Saudi Arabia on the recommenda¬
tion of right-wing Syrian politicians. He represented Ibn Saud’s finan¬
cial interests in Damascus. Making use of Saudi money and his Syrian
connections, Yassin plotted to subvert or destabilize that country.
Beginning in 1956-57, the CIA, too, launched a covert operation
aimed at toppling the Syrian government. 15 In 1958, Yassin was
implicated in a Saudi conspiracy to assassinate Egypt’s President
Nasser, who was flying into Damascus. The existence of the plot was
announced by the Syrian army’s chief of intelligence, who revealed
that Saudi Arabia had offered him a bribe of £1.9 million to help
carry it out. It would not be the last U.S.-Saudi conspiracy against
Arab nationalist leaders.

The King of All Islam • 12.5

More interesting, for our story, is the role of Mohammed Sorour
Sabhan. Sorour was the freed slave who, while serving as Saudi Ara¬
bia’s deputy finance minister in the late 1940s, was the Saudi paymas¬
ter for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. In the 1950s, Sorour had
become minister of finance and one of King Saud’s closest advisers. In
the 1960s, he would assume a powerful position overseeing Saudi
Arabia’s worldwide effort to promote the Muslim Brotherhood and
other radical Muslim fundamentalist groups, from Africa to Indone¬
sia. It isn’t known if at all, or to what extent, Sorour and Dulles dis¬
cussed the Brotherhood. But in supporting an alliance with Saudi
Arabia, then the Brotherhood’s chief financial supporter, the United
States was in fact enlisting the Brothers in the Cold War.

Asked about America’s decision to support Saudi Arabia’s Islamic
bloc against Nasser, a former senior CIA official who served in the
Middle East summarized the Cold War rationale: “What other pole
was there? King Hussein?” he asks. “The optic was the Cold War. The
Cold War was the defining clarity of the time. We saw Nasser as
socialist, anti-Western, anti-Baghdad Pact, and we were looking for
some sort of counterfoil. Saudi efforts to Islamicize the region were
seen as powerful and effective and likely to be successful. We loved
that. We had an ally against communism.” 16

One consequence of Eisenhower’s efforts in the 1950s to build up
Saudi Arabia as a bulwark against communism was the rise of the bin
Laden family. Seeking to enhance Saudi prestige as custodians of the
Muslim holy places in Mecca and Medina, Ike authorized half a mil¬
lion dollars for Saudi Arabia to study the construction of a railroad to
carry pilgrims to Mecca, part of an effort to refurbish Mecca as the
center of Islamic culture. King Saud hired Sheikh Mohammed bin
Laden to undertake the reconstruction of the Great Mosque in
Mecca. It was through this plum contract that the bin Ladens began
to accumulate their vast wealth.

12.6 • Devil’s Game

The Brotherhood’s Saudi Refuge

Initially Saudi Arabia supplied the Muslim Brotherhood with money
only. After 1954, however, the country itself became a chief base of its
operations. When Nasser cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood
in Egypt, Saudi Arabia provided an important refuge for the organiza¬
tion, and many of its members flocked to the desert kingdom. This
migration occurred just as the United States was giving up on Nasser
and turning to Saudi Arabia. The Brothers settled in Jeddah, where
they went into business, and in Riyadh, Mecca, and Medina, where
they radicalized the Wahhabi movement. For the next half century,
Saudi Arabia would be the Brothers’ ultimate redoubt, providing suc¬
cor and support, along with virtually unlimited financing.

“One of the stupidest things Faisal ever did was to invite the
Ikhwanis into Saudi Arabia,” says David Long, who’d served in the
State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. “But it seemed
innocuous at the time. At the time, everybody was fighting Commu¬
nism, and so were we. And so was Faisal.” 17 Faisal, the crown prince,
wouldn’t become king of Saudi Arabia until the 1960s, when he ousted
Saud in a palace coup, but he was widely seen as more sophisticated,
more enlightened, and far shrewder than the dissolute Saud.

The Muslim Brotherhood, a highly political organization dedi¬
cated to creating a worldwide caliphate-based Islamic state, was both
an ally and a threat to Saudi Arabia. “The Saudis weren’t terribly
happy with the Muslim Brotherhood, but if you—and the Saudis
were—scared to death of Nasser, the Muslim Brotherhood was still
the only game in town,” says John Voll, a Georgetown University
professor. 18 In its foreign policy, Saudi Arabia utilized the Brother¬
hood against Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, built its power in Sudan, encour¬
aged it in Afghanistan and Pakistan—where it allied with Abul-Ala
Mawdudi’s Islamic Group—and even toyed with supporting it in
Soviet Central Asia. But internally, the royal family did not tolerate
Muslim Brotherhood action. “The Saudis were very tolerant of the
Muslim Brotherhood, and they encouraged it in Egypt, Sudan, and
elsewhere, but they were adamantly opposed to [Brotherhood] activ-

The King of All Islam • 12.7

ity inside Saudi Arabia,” says Ray Close, who served as the CIA’s
chief of station in Saudi Arabia from 1970 to 1977. 19

“The Saudis, as you know, oppose all political parties,” says
Hermann Eilts, one of America’s most experienced Arabists, who
served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “And the Saudi regime had the
experience in the late 192.0s with the Ikhwan, not exactly the Muslim
Brotherhood but the tribesmen who were becoming rather fanatical.
Now what Hassan al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood were doing
in Egypt, and in Syria, was something that was generally in line with
Saudi thinking on the importance of Islam, as opposed to national¬
ism, as a uniting factor. Nevertheless, they were not eager to have the
Muslim Brotherhood, or any other political force, organize them¬
selves in Saudi Arabia. They were unwilling to allow any political par¬
ties, including Muslim political parties.” 20 In fact, in 1946, when
Hassan al-Banna tried to open a Muslim Brotherhood branch in
Mecca, the Saudi authorities bluntly refused. 21

Though the Saudis took strong measures to prevent the Muslim
Brotherhood from becoming a force inside Saudi Arabia, the Brothers
operated there in a semi-underground fashion. Many of them went
into business, establishing Islamic banks and corporations that made
them wealthy. Others became influential in the mass media. Close, the
CIA station chief, recalls that Richard Mitchell, the author of the defin¬
itive book, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, introduced him to one
key personality. “It was through Dick Mitchell that I met the only
member of the Ikhwan that I ever knew, Mohammed Salahuddin,” says
Close. “He was the editor of Al Medina newspaper. He was born in
Sudan, and spent some time in Egypt, knew all the Ikhwanis. His
presence was tolerated as long as he wrote things against commu¬
nism.” And still others went into academia, infiltrating Saudi Arabia’s
network of Islamic universities. Yet they operated as a secret society,
kept their membership hidden, and maintained a clandestine presence
in many Saudi institutions.

It was in the university system that the Muslim Brotherhood
would find its most secure perch. Saudi Arabia had never had much of
a system of higher education, and what it did have was overwhelm¬
ingly dedicated to training clerics and inculcating Wahhabi values

z8 • Devil’s Game

among the country’s youth. In the 1960s, Saudi Arabia created a pair
of institutions, the Islamic University of Medina (1961) and King
Abdel Aziz University (1967), which became intellectual centers for
the Islamic right. The Islamic University of Medina began with Paki¬
stan’s Mawdudi, a militant Islamist, as one of its trustees, who
wanted to make it into the fundamentalist alternative to Cairo’s A 1
Azhar, the thousand-year-old repository of the mainstream Islamic
tradition. 22 The Muslim Brotherhood and its Wahhabi allies con¬
vinced the royal family that A 1 Azhar was too close to Nasser, so they
lavishly funded the Islamic University of Medina. Dozens of Egyptian
Islamic scholars affiliated with or sympathetic to the Muslim Brother¬
hood took up posts at the university.

The vice president of the university was a man who would figure in
hard-right Islamic politics in Saudi Arabia for the next several
decades: Sheikh Abdel Aziz bin Baz. Blind since youth, bin Baz was a
fanatical Wahhabi who would resist modernization in Saudi Arabia
and flirt with violence and terrorism. In 1966, bin Baz insisted that
the Copernican view of the universe was heresy, that the sun revolved
around the earth, and that the earth itself was flat. Anyone who dis¬
agreed, said bin Baz, was guilty of “falsehood toward God, the
Koran, and the Prophet.” 23 His views angered King Faisal, but in
1974 bin Baz would be appointed president of the official Directorate
of Religious Research, Islamic Legal Rulings, Islamic Propagation,
and Guidance. 24

The Islamic University of Medina was controlled by Saudi Ara¬
bia’s Grand Mufti Mohammed ibn Ibrahim A 1 Shaikh, a chief of the
Wahhabi Al Shaikh clan. Fully 85 percent of its students were non-
Saudi, coming from virtually every Islamic country in the world.
Through this institution and its sister universities in Saudi Arabia, the
Muslim Brotherhood was able to spread its ideology everywhere. 25 In
addition, tens of thousands of young Saudis were indoctrinated
through the Saudi system of higher education. The Saudi university
system expanded exponentially, from 3,625 students in 1965 to more
than 113,000 students by 1986. Half of its six universities were reli¬
gious in nature and, according to one study, nearly one-third of all

The King of All Islam • 129

Saudi students majored in Islamic studies; for the other 70 percent, a
third of their course work was religious in nature. 26

James Akins, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia in
the early 1970s, was troubled by the emphasis on religion, but the
royal family told him to keep out of it. “They told me, ‘It’s not your
business,’” says Akins. “There wasn’t much we could do about it.”
Akins, along with more progressive Saudis, was upset that the Saudi
university system wasn’t training administrators, managers, scientists,
and engineers. “I talked to them about training more doctors,
chemists, engineers, and fewer mullahs,” recalls Akins. “But I was let
to know that I was beyond my competence, and that I was meddling
where I wasn’t wanted. I thought it was rank stupidity. It was an
absolute catastrophe, training all those mullahs. A number of the
princes urged me to talk to the power structure.” To no avail. The
Saudi ministry of education was controlled by the A 1 Shaikh, and its
hold over that part of government was unshakable.

The relationship between the A 1 Saud, the A 1 Shaikh, and the Mus¬
lim Brothers was a complex one. Some members of the royal family
were pious and orthodox, and saw Wahhabism as the righteous
Islamic path. Others, of course—King Saud and King Fahd, and hun¬
dreds of pleasure-seeking lesser princes—were libertines, whose rela¬
tionship to Wahhabi ideology was tenuous at best. The A 1 Shaikh,
usually a distinct bloodline, also began marrying the A 1 Saud, creating
family bonds that pulled parts of both clans in two directions, the
royal and the religious. (King Faisal’s mother, for instance, was from the
Al Shaikh family, giving Faisal an aura of piety that other sons of Abdel
Aziz couldn’t as easily claim.) According to Eilts, there was a “constant
tug of war” between the royal family and the religious family:

Over time, one also found that among the Al Shaikh, more and
more were leaving, and were not going into the religious leader¬
ship, but into the army and things of that nature. So the sacral
nature of the Al Shaikh family came to be diluted, so much so that
Faisal, in 1971, when the Grand Mufti died, eliminated the post
for a period and established a ministry of justice, which was seen
as a weakening of this long-standing, two-century-old relationship

30 • Devil’s Game

between the Saudis and the religious leadership. The ministry of
justice remained, but the king later reestablished the muftiate, and
named a member of the Al Shaikh family to it.

The ulema [clergy] were powerful, and the Al Shaikh family
could control the ulema. But as the Al Shaikh family weakened in
its influence, with only some members going into the clergy, and
younger people coming up and many of them becoming ulema,
the relationship between the Saudi family and the Al Shaikh fam¬
ily cracked somewhat. So you get to the current situation, where a
large number of younger people object to their elders, to the
ulema, and to the Saudi royal family and are seeking to go their
own way, and rather militantly. 27

As strains between the Al Saud and Al Shaikh began to show, the Al
Shaikh began to exhibit the effects of prolonged exposure to the Mus¬
lim Brotherhood. Whereas the Al Shaikh were establishment-oriented,
more religious than political, and above all committed to stability
(especially for the Saudi throne), the Muslim Brotherhood’s members
were often brash, highly political, and as often as not, revolution-
minded. After 1954, as more and more Brothers settled in Saudi Ara¬
bia, the Al Shaikh naturally become more militant. If the Al Shaikh
had interests that diverged from those of the Al Saud, the Muslim
Brotherhood did so even more strongly.

According to Martha Kessler, a former CIA Middle East analyst
who has studied the Muslim Brotherhood, the loyalty of the Wahhabi
establishment in Saudi Arabia to the royal family went only so far,
and that was even truer for the Brotherhood members in the king¬
dom. “The Egyptian Brothers in Saudi Arabia were even further
removed [than the Al Shaikh] from any sense of loyalty to the House
of Saud,” she says. “It’s not clear that they wanted to overthrow the
regime, but inside the Brotherhood, there was always a debate
between those who wanted to overthrow what they saw as the cor¬
rupt regimes and those who wanted to spend their time organizing,
developing a base in the community.” 28

The delicate relationship among the Saudi royal family, its Wah¬
habi establishment, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the even more rad¬
ical Islamic terrorist groups would continue to evolve. The balance

The King of All Islam • 13

would shift, depending on their relative strengths, power struggles
within the royal family, and regional politics. This balance was made
even more complex, thanks to the role of Islamic charities, often con¬
nected to one or more Saudi princes, that wittingly or unwittingly
acted as conduits for money to terrorist groups. The situation was
exacerbated by the fact that individual princes often acted indepen¬
dently of the king, the government, and other members of the family.
“The Saudi royal family is not a monolith by any means,” says Ray
Close. “There is always somebody ready to give money to someone.
There is a lot of free enterprise going on in royal family politics.”

As the Muslim Brotherhood gained influence in Saudi Arabia,
King Saud and then King Faisal skillfully incorporated the organiza¬
tion into the kingdom’s official foreign policy. In the 1960s, two land¬
mark events marked that grand design: the creation of the Muslim
World League in 1962 and the establishment of the Organization of
the Islamic Conference in 1969. Under Faisal, Saudi Arabia vigor¬
ously worked to set up an “Islamic bloc,” complete with American
support, which ultimately succeeded in eclipsing Egypt’s Nasser.

King Faisal’s Islamic Bloc

What Eisenhower had helped set in motion in the 1950s continued
apace in the decade that followed.

Faisal, king from 1964 to 1975, was a more modern monarch than
King Saud (1953-1964), and had a clear vision of Saudi Arabia’s for¬
eign policy. “Faisal,” says Charles Freeman, a veteran U.S. foreign ser¬
vice officer who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, “made a
deliberate decision that Islam was the antidote to Nasser.” 29 It was a
development that Washington viewed enthusiastically. Although some
secular-minded U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers registered
objections from time to time, the U.S.-Saudi alliance was set in stone,
and so Saudi Arabia’s Islam-based foreign policy worried few. Even
advocates of the U.S.-Israeli alliance, who gained momentum in the
1960s, were far more worried about Nasser than about Saudi Arabia.

The foundation of the Muslim World League in 1962 marks the

32. • Devil’s Game

formal beginning of the resurgence of radical-right political Islam.
Founded in Mecca in 1962, the Muslim World League was a Who's
Who of the Islamic right. For the first time the movement had a
central nervous system more organized than the clandestine Muslim
Brotherhood. The virtually unlimited ability of Saudi Arabia to fund
the organization gave it enormous clout. Among the founding mem¬
bers and officers of the League 30 were virtually all of the leaders of the
Islamic resurgence, including:

Said Ramadan, the son-in-law of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of
the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Brotherhood’s chief inter¬
national organizer, who’d spent years in Syria, Jordan, Pakistan
and elsewhere before opening the Islamic Center of Geneva in
1961, with Saudi support.

Abul-Ala Mawdudi, the founder of Pakistan’s radical-right
Islamic Society (Jamaat-e Islami), who is the single most impor¬
tant architect of the notion of an Islamic Republic, and who
played a crucial role in battering Pakistan’s left-secular opposition
movement and in pushing Pakistan into the hard-right Islamic
camp under Zia ul-Haq, the dictator who seized power in 1977.

Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the pro-Nazi mufti of Jerusalem,
who’d been an agent of British intelligence since the 1920s and
who, after World War II, became a Saudi-funded anti-Nasser pro¬
pagandist.

Muhammad Sadiq al-Mujaddidi of Afghanistan, who main¬
tained CIA contacts in that unfortunate country in the 1960s and
whose direct heirs would form the core of the 1979-89 anti-Soviet
Afghan jihad backed by the CIA, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan.

Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Shaikh, the government-appointed
Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia and the titular head of the Wahhabi
movement, who had enormous clout within the Saudi royal family.

Abdel Rahman al-Iryani, the militant Muslim fundamentalist
who would take power in Yemen in 1967 and lead that formerly
pro-Nasser republic into the Saudi camp after a long civil war.

The King of All Islam • 133

In all, a couple of dozen of the world’s leading Islamists came together
in the League. 31

“The Wahhabi vision went international in the 1960s in response
to the threat posed by Arab nationalism and socialism,” wrote
Georgetown University’s John Esposito. “Saudi Arabia and other
monarchies were threatened in particular by Nasserism and in general
by radical Arab socialist governments. . . . The Saudis championed a
pan-Islamic policy against Nasser’s ‘secular, socialist’ pan-Arabism
with its ties to ‘atheistic communism.’. . . The Saudi government also
developed close ties with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaat-e
Islami. Despite significant differences, they shared [an] antipathy to
common enemies—Nasserism, secularism, communism.” 32

The Muslim World League sent out missionaries, printed propa¬
ganda, and doled out funds for the building of Wahhabi-oriented
mosques and Islamic associations:

The league identified worthy beneficiaries, invited them to Saudi
Arabia, and gave them the recommendation (tazkiya) that would
later provide them with largesse from a generous private donor, a
member of the royal family, a prince, or an ordinary businessman.

The league was managed by members of the Saudi religious estab¬
lishment, working with other Arabs who either belonged to the
Muslim Brothers or were close to them, along with ulemas from
the Indian subcontinent connected to the Deoband Schools or to
the party founded by Mawdudi. 33

The CIA was only vaguely aware of the Muslim World League’s
importance, and official Washington—committed to winning the
Cold War regardless of how unsavory its allies—didn’t ask the CIA to
investigate it. “We saw it all in a short-term perspective,” says a CIA
officer who served in Saudi Arabia. “We weren’t looking at long-term
consequences.” According to this officer, in the early 1970s the CIA
tried to place an agent inside the Muslim World League. “I ran a pen¬
etration of Rabitat,” he' says, using the Arabic name for the organiza¬
tion. “It was considered, in Washington, as one of the least important
things I’d done.” Headquarters was interested in wars, coups, and
gunrunning in the Persian Gulf, not in the activities of the League. “I

34 ‘ Devil’s Game

found it fascinating, and important,” he says. “I didn’t see Rabitat as
an effort to expand Saudi Arabia’s own influence internationally, but
as a way to expand Islam’s influence in the Arab world and beyond. It
wasn’t Saudi Arabia so much as, well, kind of a ‘Vatican’-type organism.
It’s almost as if it were an operation being run in spite of the Saudis.”
Yet, he says, it certainly wasn’t seen as a threat, or something of geopo¬
litical concern, and Washington wasn’t interested. “The sound of snor¬
ing,” he says, “was deafening.” The covert operation was dropped. 34

Charles Waterman, a CIA Arabist who spent many years in the
Middle East and ultimately became the agency’s chief of station in
Saudi Arabia, says that to the CIA the Muslim World League looked
innocent enough in the 1960s and 1970s. “It looked like another
Muslim organization worth monitoring, but not something to worry
about,” says Waterman. “If they ended up supporting Islamic student
movements somewhere, and they got involved in some conflict with
left-wing students, our reaction was, ‘Okay, fine, another benign
action intended to control the left.’ ” Was the CIA wrong at the time
for not focusing on these groups and these characters? “They seemed
like they were just Islamic charitable organizations, and so what?” 35

Ray Close, the former CIA chief, agrees. Asked whether the CIA
had any worries about ties between Muslim Brotherhood and Wah¬
habi clergy, he says: “We didn’t follow it. If anyone is at fault, it was
me. We just didn’t see them as a threat. They weren’t a target of ours.
I’d get target lists—but no one in Washington was asking me to look
at them. ... It didn’t enter into our consciousness.”

Ninety-nine percent of the funding for the Muslim World League
came from the government of Saudi Arabia. Its ties to the Saudi estab¬
lishment were manifold. One of the League’s secretary-generals,
Muhammad Ali al-Harkan, was a leading Wahhabi and ex-Saudi
minister of justice, who would later serve as de facto grand mufti of
Saudi Arabia. Besides the ministry of justice, the Wahhabis and the
League interlocked with the Saudi ministry of education and the pow¬
erful ministry of pilgrimage and religious endowments, which con¬
trolled the enormous annual Muslim pilgrimages to Mecca and the
vast funds available for charities and proselytizing. All that, in turn,

The King of All Islam • 135

meshed with the university system, especially the Islamic universities.
The League worked closely with the militant World Assembly of
Muslim Youth (WAMY), established in 1972, which would later be
accused of sustaining terrorist activities overseas. 36

During the 1960s, the struggle between Egypt and Saudi Arabia—
in effect, a proxy fight in which the United States took the Saudi
side—unfolded in two directions: first, in yet another flare-up of the
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt; and second, in a shooting war that pit¬
ted Nasser against Faisal in Yemen, a tiny nation at the southwestern
corner of the Arabian Peninsula. In both cases, the ties linking the
Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim World League, and the Arab
world’s conservative monarchies provided Riyadh with a powerful
regional apparatus to wield against Nasser.

Ramadan and the Return of the Brothers

A central organizer of the Saudi Islamic bloc was the man whom Ike
had encountered in the Oval Office in 1953: Said Ramadan. According
to a Swiss report, during this period Ramadan was believed to have
been an American agent. He also got help from West Germany, was
backed financially by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and served as Jordan’s
representative to the United Nations in Geneva. At the same time,
Ramadan served as the international mastermind of the Muslim
Brotherhood, and in 1965 he was allegedly involved in a second
assassination attempt against Nasser. The action against Nasser
occurred in the midst of yet another revolt by the Brotherhood in
Egypt, this time aided by Ramadan’s well-organized apparatus of
exiles. Part of his machine was based in Saudi Arabia, and part in
Geneva, where Ramadan had settled.

Compared to its pre-1954 strength, the organization in Egypt was
a shadow of its former self. It had been forced to operate deep under¬
ground since the 1950s. It tried to establish front organizations and
political salons to maintain its organizational presence, but Nasser’s
security services were effective in repressing it. By the mid-1960s,
however, many of the political prisoners who had been arrested in the

36 • Devil’s Game

post-1954 crackdown on the movement had been released. Once
again they tried to organize against Nasser.

From Geneva, Ramadan was pulling many of the organization’s
strings. In 1954, Nasser had stripped him of his Egyptian citizenship,
and he went into exile. With help from the West German government,
which was angry at Egypt for having recognized East Germany, and
traveling on a West German diplomatic passport, he went to Munich,
West Germany, before going to Switzerland. There, bankrolled by the
king of Saudi Arabia, Ramadan established the Islamic Center of
Geneva in 1961, which would serve as a headquarters for the Muslim
Brotherhood. Ramadan would live there for the next thirty-four
years, until his death in 1995.

The Center became an organizational nerve center, publishing
house, and meeting place for the Islamic right and Muslim Brother¬
hood activists from across the Muslim world. According to Richard
Labeviere, a journalist who has written about the Muslim Brother¬
hood’s ties to terrorism, Ramadan not only managed the organiza¬
tion’s funds but, along with Youssef Nada, a Brotherhood financier,
helped to establish the group’s bank, A 1 Taqwa. 37

In 1962, Ramadan helped Saudi Arabia establish the Muslim
World League. “My father wasn’t just one of the leaders of the found¬
ing group of the league,” says Hani Ramadan, Said’s son and the cur¬
rent director of the Islamic Center in Geneva. “He had the original
idea for the creation of an Islamic league, which eventually became a
parallel channel though which he could communicate his thoughts.”
According to Hani Ramadan, the Islamic Center was well received in
Switzerland when it was first established. “There was nothing like
today’s Islamophobia,” he says. “The first reactions to my father’s
activity and to the presence of an Islamic Center in Geneva were posi¬
tive, both within Switzerland and more generally with the European
public.” But Hani Ramadan admits that the whole purpose of the
venture was to promote the Muslim Brotherhood. “The creation of
the Islamic Center was supposed to realize my father’s desire of creat¬
ing a center from which he could spread the teachings of Hassan al-
Banna, a place where students coming from various Arab countries
could meet and be trained in the message of Islam.” 38

The King of All Islam • 137

Scattered in exile, and underground in Egypt, the Muslim Brother¬
hood grew ever more radical in the early 1960s. In Cairo, the Brother¬
hood was gathering strength for another showdown with Nasser.
Elsewhere, political Islam was growing. Saudi Arabia was increas¬
ingly making an aggressive bid to act as leader of the Arab and Islamic
blocs; Ayatollah Khomeini was beginning to stir in Iran; Iraqi funda¬
mentalist Shiites had created a conspiratorial political party, the
Call; 39 and Mawdudi’s movement in Pakistan was gaining momen¬
tum. When the 1965 crisis over the Brotherhood exploded in Egypt,
Ramadan and the Brotherhood’s chief ideologue, the militant leader
Sayyid Qutb, both of whom were allegedly behind an attempt to kill
Nasser, were at the center of the crisis. This time, Nasser was better
prepared, and he called on friends and supporters within Egypt’s
Muslim clergy to back him, while painting Ramadan and the Muslim
Brotherhood as U.S. agents. “On 30 August Egyptian public opinion
learned, through a speech Nasser delivered from Moscow, that the
Society of Muslim Brethren was the force behind a gigantic plot
exposed by the intelligence services. Their accomplices, said the presi¬
dent, included Mustapha Amin, a leading liberal journalist arrested
on 2 September on charges of ‘spying for the United States.’ After the
raids, the regime’s religious functionaries, spokesmen, and writers
were mobilized to denounce seditious elements,... condemning the
Muslim Brethren as ‘medieval terrorists,’ ” writes Gilles Kepel, one
the world’s foremost analysts of political Islam. “The newspapers
exposed the foreign links of the ‘religious fanatics’: Said Ramadan, al-
Banna’s son-in-law, was said to be pulling the strings from Amman,
Jordan, on orders from CENTO.” 40 Ramadan may or may not have
been a U.S. agent, but there is no doubt that he had aligned himself
closely with the axis of nations—including Pakistan, a CENTO mem¬
ber, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia—that the United States was supporting
against Nasser.

According to Le Temps, Egypt wasn’t the only government that
considered Said Ramadan to be an American agent. The government
of Switzerland, too, believed that Ramadan was working for the
United States. In 1966, at the height of crisis in Egypt, a high-level
meeting of Swiss officials, including diplomats, the Swiss federal

38 ■ Devil’s Game

police, and the security services, met to discuss Ramadan’s case. Doc¬
uments now in the Swiss archives reveal that the Swiss authorities
concluded that Ramadan represented a “conservative tendency, pro-
Western and not hostile” to the interests of Switzerland. The Swiss
archives also reveal that the Swiss, at least, believed that Ramadan
was an agent of the CIA and MI6. “He was more than a simple pro¬
pagandist appreciated for his anti-communism,” according to Le
Temps. A Swiss government analyst concluded: “Said Ramadan is,
among other things, an intelligence agent of the English and the
Americans.” Le Temps noted that Ramadan’s ties “to certain Western
secret services are suggested in several documents in his dossier.” 41

Nasser’s 1965-66 crackdown on the Brotherhood decimated the
organization once again. Many of its underground leaders were
arrested and others fled. Nasser ordered the execution by hanging
of the organization’s chief ideologue and theoretician, Sayyid Qutb,
who had earlier been granted exile in Saudi Arabia. 42 According to
Hermann Eilts, King Faisal vigorously intervened with Nasser on
Qutb’s behalf, to no avail. 43

Kennedy, Nasser, and Yemen

The struggle between Nasser and Faisal erupted into open warfare
from 1962 to 1970, when Egypt and Saudi Arabia fought a bitter and
bloody proxy war in Yemen. The two protagonists were at the height
of their powers in the 1960s. Nasser was an Arab icon with followers
in every Arab country, and Faisal—who edged out King Saud in the
early 1960s—was using Saudi money, the Muslim World League, and
the Wahhabi movement to bolster the conservative coalition. The
Egyptian leader, wielding his typically colorful rhetoric, blasted the
desert kingdom for acting on behalf of U.S. imperialism, while Faisal
equated Nasser’s Arab socialism with “atheistic communism.”

Although the war was by and large invisible to the American pub¬
lic, it had a very significant impact on U.S. policy in the Middle East,
strengthening American ties to the conservative Arab states and above
all to Saudi Arabia and its Islamic bloc. The story of the Yemen war’s

The King of All Islam • 139

impact on U.S. Middle East policy is told in some detail in Warren
Bass’s Support Any Friend, an account of the Kennedy administra¬
tion’s flirtation with Nasser. With the departure of Eisenhower and
his uncompromising attitude toward nonalignment, the Kennedy
administration offered an olive branch to Egypt. Under Kennedy,
some U.S. officials accepted that Nasser was independent, not a Soviet
pawn, and that Washington would have to reach an accommodation
with him. Optimists believed that Nasser, who was no communist—in
fact, he ruthlessly locked up members of the Egyptian Communist
Party and other leftists—might be convinced to abandon his ties to
the USSR. More realistic analysts felt that Nasser could at least be
persuaded to reach a modus vivendi with the United States. And, of
course, still others, especially partisans of Israel, saw Nasser much as
Saudi Arabia did, as the devil incarnate.

“Our relations with Nasser were difficult,” recalls Talcott Seelye,
who headed the State Department’s Arabian Peninsula desk during the
Kennedy years. “We saw that his movement constituted a threat to the
Saudi regime, and there was a reaction in Saudi Arabia, too. Prince
Talal [one of the so-called Saudi ‘Free Princes’] defected [to Egypt],
and two Saudi pilots did, too. So we were very worried about the sur¬
vival of the Saudi regime .” 44 The CIA prepared a National Intelligence
Estimate (NIE) called “Nasser and the Future of Arab Nationalism,”
which told the White House: “Militant nationalism will continue to be
the most dynamic force in Arab political affairs, and Nasser is very
likely to remain its foremost leader and symbol for the foreseeable
future.” It went on to warn the young president that “the long-term
outlook for the conservative and Western-aligned regimes is bleak,”
and that the Saudi regime was likely to be swept away . 45

Kennedy thought it worthwhile to explore an opening to Nasser,
to the chagrin of both Israel and Saudi Arabia, and he began a series
of exchanges with the Egyptian leader, through diplomatic contacts,
letters, and personal meetings. To Kennedy, Nasser wrote: “Why does
the United States, a country established on foundations of freedom
and by means of a revolution, oppose the call of freedom and revolu¬
tionary movements, and line up with reactionary forces and enemies

40 • Devil’s Game

of progress?” 46 By reactionary forces, of course, Nasser meant above
all Saudi Arabia, and his question was a good one. Unlike Ike, who
reflexively saw independent-minded Third World countries as commu¬
nist stooges, JFK was willing to explore the possibility that such move¬
ments were not necessarily incompatible with U.S. interests. In fact, as
a senator in the 1950s, Kennedy “blasted the Eisenhower administra¬
tion’s ‘head-in-the-sand’ attitude toward Arab nationalism.” 47

But the Kennedy-Nasser duet faltered, and ultimately failed. In
September 1962, pro-Nasser forces overthrew the medieval govern¬
ment of Yemen, which occupied a crucial piece of real estate strategi¬
cally positioned on the southern flank of Saudi Arabia astride the
Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. At the time, Kennedy said, “I don’t
even know where it is.” 48 The leader of Yemen in 1962 was Imam
Ahmad, a decrepit, 300-pound autocrat with a reputation for brutal¬
ity. He thought of himself as the “protector of God’s religion,” and he
denounced Nasser’s economic program as “un-Islamic.” 49 When he
died, rebels backed by Nasser overthrew his equally reactionary son,
Mohammed al-Badr. According to Seelye, Nasser “was behind the
overthrow of the regime, and Saudi Arabia was very, very upset.” 50
The revolution in Yemen, soon backed by the arrival of thousands of
Egyptian troops, posed a threat to the very existence of Saudi Arabia.
Robert Komer, the White House aide for Middle East policy, warned
Kennedy, “The House of Saud well knows it could be next.” 51 Saudi
Arabia, alarmed, lent arms and money to the Yemeni monarchists.
The subsequent war left 200,000 dead in nearly a decade of fighting.

Kennedy had already been warned, by the CIA and others, that
Saudi Arabia’s regime might not last long, and that Nasser was likely
the Arab world’s future. Initially, he tried to be even-handed, recogniz¬
ing the new government of Yemen and sending Ellsworth Bunker to
mediate a settlement between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But pressure
mounted on Kennedy from all directions. The British, still clinging to
their precarious perch in the Arab Gulf and Aden, were again (as dur¬
ing the Suez Crisis) apoplectic about Nasser. Prime Minister Harold
Macmillan, who’d been in the British government during Suez, wanted
to “tear Nasser’s scalp off with his fingernails.” 52 They immediately

The King of All Islam • 141

devised a scheme with Israel’s secret service, the Mossad, to aid the
anti-Nasser forces in Yemen by supplying them with arms and finan¬
cial help. “MI6’s former vice-chief, George Young, who was now a
banker with Kleinwort Benson, was approached by Mossad to find an
Englishman acceptable to the Saudis to run a guerrilla war against
the [Yemeni] republicans and their Egyptian backers,” wrote Dorril.
“‘I can find you a Scotsman,’ replied Young. He then introduced
McLean to Brigadier Dan Hiram, the Israeli defense attache, who
promised to supply weapons, funds, and instructors who could pass
themselves off as Arabs, a strategy that the Saudis eagerly grasped.” 53
Israel drew on its population of Yemeni Jews, who had immigrated to
Israel and who could pass themselves off as Yemeni Arabs, and dis¬
patched them to the war zone where they served as military instruc¬
tors. According to Dorril: “The CIA helped the Israelis infiltrate back
into Yemen some of these Jews to train the guerrillas in the use of
modern weapons. The trainers, naturally, took care to disguise their
true nationality.” Both Iran’s SAVAK secret service and Saudi Arabian
intelligence were witting members of the anti-Nasser front in Yemen.
Israel also contributed arms to the rebels, including Soviet-made
weapons it had seized in conflicts with the Arab states. “The CIA and
MI6 relied on ... ‘practical-minded members of the Saudi royal fam¬
ily’ to develop a covert alliance between Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran,
and Jordan.” 54 According to Howard Teicher, a pro-Israeli U.S. offi¬
cial, the Israeli air force also intervened on behalf of Saudi Arabia
against Egypt, during the war in Yemen. “Israeli warplanes,” wrote
Teicher, “flew south over the Red Sea to signal unambiguously to the
Egyptians to keep their distance from Saudi Arabia.” 55

In Washington, the British urged Kennedy to take a stand against
Nasser. Further pressure on Kennedy came, of course, from Israel. Dur¬
ing the war in Yemen, the Israelis tried to reinforce those in Washington
who saw Nasser as a tool in a Soviet scheme to control the Persian
Gulf, and Israel cast itself as America’s most reliable anti-communist
ally in the region.

Yet more pressure came from the big U.S. oil companies, who were
alarmed over the threat that Nasser posed to their cash cow, Saudi

4* • Devil’s Game

Arabia. Aides to Kennedy were swamped with lobbying from the
Aramco partners and Gulf Oil. The latter company was represented
by Kermit Roosevelt, who told the White House that U.S. interests
and Nasser’s “are simply incompatible.” JFK sent a former Aramco
executive, Terry Duce, to meet with King Faisal on his behalf. 56 And
Kennedy began to run operations against Egypt in and around
Yemen. “Kennedy,” says former ambassador Charles Freeman, “was
screwing around with all sorts of covert operations and the Green
Berets in Arabia.” 57

Kennedy’s overture to Nasser was over. More important, the United
States had squarely set itself against a central goal of Arab nationalists:
to unite Egypt and other oil-poor Arab nations with Saudi Arabia’s
vast wealth. “The Saudi kingdom has always been wary of any Arab
unification scheme,” wrote Shireen Hunter. “The Arab nationalists
believed, for example, that the oil of Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich
Arab states belonged to the Arab nation and not only to the oil produc¬
ers and should be used for Arab economic development and be at the
service of achieving its other goals.... Thus the Arab radicals posed
an existential threat to Saudi Arabia.” 58 In retrospect, it is possible to
ask: What might have happened if the United States had supported or
tolerated Nasser, and had allowed Saudi Arabia to fall to Nasser? In
the 1960s, in the midst of the Cold War, it was an unthinkable option.

The Johnson administration vigorously reinforced the U.S.-Saudi
alliance. King Faisal was lionized by LBJ, who offered military assis¬
tance and technical help to the Saudi ruler, who’d replaced the dis¬
credited King Saud at the start of the Yemen war. A $400 million
Anglo-American air defense program was launched in Saudi Arabia,
along with a massive scheme to build military bases and other infra¬
structure and a $100 million U.S. program to supply Saudi Arabia
with trucks and military transport vehicles. 59

The U.S. support for Saudi Arabia tacitly backed a vast inter¬
national effort by King Faisal to rally Muslim support in the Cold
War. In 1965, Faisal began a frenetic tour of Muslim countries to find
allies, describing Marxism as “a subversive creed originated by a vile
Jew.” 60 He was ever more determined to stamp it out. He joined the
shah in calling for a grand Islamic alliance, and visited Jordan, Sudan,

The King of All Islam • 143

Pakistan, Turkey, Morocco, Guinea, and Mali in 1966 to drum up
support.

In Jordan, he wailed that “the powers of evil have planned to fight
Islam and Muslims wherever they are” and are “trying to kill every
sign of Islamic influence.” 61 In Sudan, he proclaimed: “As for the
communists, they are attacking us because the Islamic movement is
going to destroy all that communism stands for, in particular, disbelief
in the Almighty God.” Noting that the USSR contained Muslim terri¬
tories, he added: “The Communists fear the expansion of our move¬
ment because it will reach the Islamic territories that have fallen under
their oppressive domination.” 62 In Pakistan, he issued a clarion call
for an Islamic bloc despite the fact that Islam “is facing many under¬
currents that are pulling Moslems left and right.” 63 Pakistan, a right-
wing Islamic state that was part of two formal alliances with the
West, sent troops to stabilize Saudi Arabia from both internal and
external threats. Beginning in the early 1960s, Pakistani army officers
had taken up posts in Saudi Arabia’s armed forces, as trainers and
commanders. One of them was General Zia ul-Haq, who in 1977
would mount an Islamist coup d’etat against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. 64

Though Faisal’s campaign for Islamic solidarity drew support
among right-wing Islamic states—even the shah, no fan of Islamic
fundamentalism, favored it—it was seen by Egypt, Syria, and Iraq as
threatening. But Faisal’s Islamic bloc was viewed favorably by Lon¬
don and Washington. In 1966, a political officer in the British
embassy in Saudi Arabia explicitly endorsed Faisal’s efforts, adding
that the United States was in accord, too:

I take the relaxed view of Faisal’s activities. . . . The American
embassy here, with whom we have discussed the subject at several
levels, share this view. That is to say that the concept of Islam as
an aggressive force has completely disappeared except among
some older Saudis. 65

After all, he wrote approvingly, the Saudi enmity was directed only
against communism, Zionism, and a handful of Christian missionaries.
As Faisal’s star rose, Nasser’s fell. The crushing end to Nasser’s

44 ’ Devil’s Game

appeal came in 1967, when, in six devastating days of war, Israel
defeated Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and their allies, occupying Jerusalem
and parts of all three countries, including the Sinai peninsula. Nasser
would live for another three years, but the 1967 war sapped Arab
nationalism’s vitality. “Nasser was able to retool anti-colonialism and
excite people, but the 1967 war blew that myth totally, because he
lost, and not only lost, but lost miserably,” says David Long. “I was in
Jeddah, and my boss, the political counselor, said to me: ‘That’s the
end of Nasser.’ ” 66

Faisal, now with clear American backing, redoubled his efforts to
organize a bloc of Islamic states, touring as far afield as Indonesia,
Algeria, Afghanistan, and Malaysia. “Faisal,” wrote the authors of
The House ofSaud, “had become more demented than ever about the
‘Zionist-Bolshevist’ conspiracy.” 67 His efforts came to fruition in
1969, in part thanks to the actions of a mentally unbalanced Aus¬
tralian who attempted to set fire to Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa mosque.
Whether this was a convenient provocation or deliberately staged as
an excuse to mobilize Islamic militancy, King Faisal eagerly seized on
it, summoning leaders of the Islamic world to Rabat, Morocco, for
what would be the world’s first Islamic summit conference. Because
the imagery of Al Aqsa was so strong, even Egypt felt compelled
to attend Faisal’s triumphant gathering. 68 Although Syria and Iraq
boycotted the meeting, twenty-five nations attended. The summit
resolved to create the Organization of the Islamic Conference, an
ever-expanding mini-United Nations for the Islamic world, which
rapidly moved Islamism to the center of the agenda in country after
country: in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Turkey, and among the Arabs.

Nominally anti-Israel, Faisal’s real goal was to forge a broad
Islamic front against the Soviet Union. “By the late 1960s we’re still
fighting communism, so we reinforced Faisal’s support for the Mus¬
lim Brotherhood and pan-Islam,” says David Long. “We needed them
against any allies that Moscow could conjure up. If Saudi Arabia
could help create an institutionalized Islamic consensus, so much the
better.”

Long, a perceptive analyst with a strong sense of irony, says that
despite the fact that it was glaringly obvious, most U.S. policy makers

The King of All Islam • 145

and analysts had little or no appreciation of the potentially explosive
nature of the Islamic resurgence. “We didn’t see Islam. We saw Saudi
Arabia,” he says. “Pan-Islam was not, to us, seen as a strategic threat.
There were bad guys doing bad things to people on the left, to Nasser.
They were fighting the pinkos. So we didn’t see pan-Islam as a
threat.”

In 1970, working as an analyst at the State Department’s Bureau
of Intelligence and Research, Long had an inkling that the energy of
pan-Islam might be channeled into anti-Americanism one day, but no
one was listening:

I was at INR in 1970, and I tried to write about Islam. But there was
no market for it. I felt that there was still a body of disenchanted,
disaffected people who were still focused on anti-colonialism, even
though the 1967 war had shattered the myth of Nasser. I saw
increasing disillusionment with Arab nationalism, but most people
didn’t see it. Sooner or later, I felt that these guys would latch on to
something, and that that something might be Islam, since they were
still disaffected. I just felt that Islam would be the new paradigm,
but the higher-ups were still following the old script. I was sensing
that disillusionment with Arab nationalism and Nasserism was
setting in. I became profoundly suspicious that there would not be
a follow-on to Nasser, to create the transnational movement that
would appeal to the malcontents. I didn’t see anyone coming
along, except Islam. 69

The Arab defeat in the 1967 war encouraged an Islamic resur¬
gence. The Arabs’ crushing loss raised critical questions about the
future of the Arab world. It provoked inchoate anger among the pop¬
ulation of the countries involved, and it led to enormous turmoil in
Arab politics. On the one hand, between 1967 and 1970, several Arab
regimes fell to left-leaning nationalists. Hafez Assad took over Syria,
Muammar Qaddafi ousted Libya’s king, Jaafar Numeiri seized power
in Sudan, the Arab Baath Socialist Party rose to power in Iraq, and the
Palestinians came close to toppling Jordan’s King Hussein in the
uprising culminating in Black September 1970. Some of these leaders
cited Nasser as a hero and role model.

146 • Devil’s Game

But another ideology was seeking to replace Nasser-style national¬
ism: Islamism.

The seeming inability of the Arabs to compete with Israel and the
loss of more Arab territory (the Sinai peninsula, Gaza, the Golan
Heights, and the West Bank) were stinging blows. Nasser’s enemies,
including the Muslim Brotherhood, used them against him, charging
that Nasserism and Arab socialism had failed. They began preaching
about a return to Islam as the solution to the Arab world’s ills. It was
a timeless message, delivered in the past by Jamal Eddine al-Afghani
and Hassan al-Banna. But in the wake of the 1967 debacle, it res¬
onated with millions of angry Arabs.

Watching Iraq, Libya, and Sudan fall to rebels, both Saudi Arabia
and the United States were desperate to contain the spiraling changes
in the Arab world, not least to deflect the growing strength of the
Palestinian movement and the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Saudi Arabia bet on conservative Islam as the antidote to Nasserism,
and the United States went along.

Three years later, in the midst of the Black September civil war in
Jordan, Nasser died. He was replaced by Anwar Sadat. Sadat’s eleven-
year career as president of Egypt was, from the standpoint of Washing¬
ton and Riyadh, a real blessing. The wily ex-Muslim Brotherhood
member and longtime Nasser aide struck up an alliance with Saudi
Arabia, suppressed Egypt’s left, brought the Muslim Brotherhood tri¬
umphantly back to Cairo, and finally realigned Egypt with the United
States and Israel. Sadat would change the course of history. And for all
that, he would die at the hands of Islamist assassins.

THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE

In the 1970s, guided by Kamal Adham, Saudi Arabia’s chief of
intelligence, Anwar Sadat brought the Muslim Brotherhood back to
Egypt. The United States, accustomed to working with Saudi Arabia,
was untroubled by the rise of Islamism in Egypt. In fact, Washington
was so eager to work with Anwar Sadat to bring Egypt over to the
U.S. side in the Cold War that policy makers, diplomats, and intelli¬
gence officers viewed Sadat’s restoration of the Islamic right benignly
or tacitly encouraged it.

But Sadat had opened a Pandora’s box. Once freed, the Brother
hood knew no bounds. Back in their ancestral home, the Brothers
worked feverishly to spread their influence worldwide. The conse¬
quences were profound, and deadly—not least for the Egyptian presi¬
dent himself.

Concurrent with the growth of the Islamic right in Egypt, Sadat
helped engineer a dramatic expansion of America’s power in the
Middle East. Under Nasser, Egypt was a nation at odds with the United
States. Twenty thousand Soviet troops, technicians, and advisers
backed Egypt’s armed forces; a war of attrition was under way along
the Egypt-Israel border; and Egypt and the United States lacked even
normal diplomatic ties. But Sadat established a covert relationship

48 • Devil’s Game

with Adham, the CIA, and Henry Kissinger, the U.S. national security
adviser. In 1971, within a year of assuming control, Sadat ousted the
Egyptian left from the government, and in 1972 he stunned Moscow
by expelling the Soviet forces. After the 1973 Ramadan War—waged
in concert with Saudi Arabia and organized around Islamic themes
rather than Arab nationalism—Egypt and the United States reestab¬
lished ties. In 1977, Sadat flew to Jerusalem, splitting the Arab world
and opening negotiations with Israel that led to the Camp David
Egypt-Israel agreement. By 1980, Egypt was America’s leading Arab
ally, engaged in supporting the U.S. jihad in Afghanistan and provid¬
ing a base for U.S. influence in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. For even the
most cynical U.S. Middle East specialists, the change in Egypt, from
foe to ally, was dizzying.

At the beginning, few expected very much from Sadat. For thirty
years, he had operated in Nasser’s shadow. He’d been a member of
the Muslim Brotherhood and played the role of intermediary in the
intrigue between the palace, the Brotherhood, and the Free Officers
movement. After Nasser’s coup, Sadat served as the Egyptian leader’s
liaison to the Brotherhood, then functioned as Egypt’s unofficial
ambassador to Islamists worldwide. But to Egyptians and to U.S. offi¬
cials, Sadat never seemed to be more than a second banana. After
Nasser’s death, in October 1970, Sadat was widely seen as a place¬
holder who would be ousted after a behind-the-scenes struggle for
power in Cairo. “In the United States, expectations of Sadat were
zip,” says David Long, a former U.S. foreign service officer. “He was
the bumbling vice president.” 1

In his autobiography, In Search of Identity, Sadat wrote that when
American envoy Elliott Richardson returned home to Washington
after visiting Cairo to offer condolences on Nasser’s death, he pre¬
dicted that Sadat “wouldn’t survive in power for more than four or
six weeks.” 2 Inside Egypt, Sadat faced formidable opponents, includ¬
ing Nasser-style nationalists, who were deeply suspicious of Sadat,
and communist-leaning or pro-Soviet officials. Sadat himself had no
real political base or constituency. Yet not only did Sadat survive, he
succeeded in engineering a complete about-face in Egypt’s foreign and
domestic policies. Where Nasser had forged ties to Syria, Iraq, and

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice • 149

Algeria, Sadat embraced the conservative monarchies of Saudi Arabia
and the Gulf. Where Nasser relied on the Soviet Union for arms and
maintained a nonaligned posture internationally, Sadat broke Egypt’s
ties to the USSR and enrolled Egypt in America’s Cold War bloc. And
where Nasser promoted Egypt as a Third World leader along with
Yugoslavia, India, and African and Latin American nations, Sadat
implemented an Egypt-centered, go-it-alone foreign policy.

Sadat consolidated his shaky rule by unleashing the power of the
Islamic right as a hammer against the left, with the generous financial
assistance of Saudi Arabia. Though Nasser had suppressed the Mus¬
lim Brotherhood and fought to reduce the power of right-wing
Islamism in Egypt, Sadat welcomed the exiled Muslim Brotherhood
back to Egypt, reinvigorated the organization, and built its institu¬
tional presence within the universities, professional associations, and
the media. Before Sadat, the Islamists were for the most part fringe¬
dwelling, marginalized radicals; after Sadat, the Muslim Brotherhood
and its even more radical youth wing were part of mainstream politi¬
cal discourse in Egypt.

People who traveled even casually to Egypt during the 1970s were
struck by this thorough transformation. In the schools, in the streets,
in the mosques, in the press, there were manifestations of the growing
presence of Islamic fundamentalism. Michael Dunn, editor of the
Middle East Journal, says that he could not help but be amazed by
the shift during the mid-1970s. “In Egypt things changed dramati¬
cally,” he says. “People were wearing beards everywhere. There were
things called Muslim Brotherhood magazines or newspapers. People
were wearing white djellabas. The mosques were overflowing, with
people spilling out into the streets.” 3 Students flocked to join Islamist
groups, and thousands of new mosques were constructed. Muslim
Brotherhood-linked banks and businesses sprouted, and phalanxes of
Islamist thugs emerged to intimidate political opponents.

But for Sadat, it was a fatal embrace.

Initially, the Islamic right served as Sadat’s allies. Gradually, how¬
ever, more and more of them turned against him, especially after the
Egyptian-Israeli accord. In Egypt, Sadat underestimated the depth
and virulence of the growing Islamist opposition, especially among its

50 • Devil’s Game

terrorist factions. In the United States, the State Department and the
CIA failed to pay sufficient attention to the danger from the Islamic
right in Egypt, relying instead on assurances from the Egyptians that
it was under control. By the time Sadat was assassinated in 1981
by members of a militant Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, a violent
Islamist underground was flourishing. Other Egyptian officials were
assassinated, tourists massacred, Christians attacked, and secular Egyp¬
tian intellectuals murdered or silenced.

Once again, Egypt would be the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief base
of operations.

Sadat Uncages the Brothers

No one was more closely connected to Anwar Sadat’s reconstruction
of Egyptian politics than Kamal Adham, the chief of Saudi intelligence.
Adham, secretly working the back channels to Henry Kissinger, U.S.
secretary of state and national security adviser, was busily setting the
stage for America’s Cold War empire in the Middle East.

Even before Nasser’s death, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other
wealthy Gulf states had stepped in after Egypt’s defeat in 1967, offer¬
ing promises of financial aid to the battered country as a way of
strengthening political ties. Saudi Arabia quietly began to back the
Brotherhood in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood blamed Nasser’s
alleged lack of piety and suppression of Islam for the reverses suffered
in the war, and they began agitating against Nasser. “The Saudi cam¬
paign made itself felt at a time of student unrest in Cairo in the sum¬
mer of 1969,” wrote Reinhard Schulze. “For the first time in years,
oppositionists openly appeared as ‘Muslim Brothers’ and demanded a
more definite fight against left-wing and communist activities.” 4

After Nasser died, Faisal maintained a lingering suspicion of
Sadat, but Adham worked hard to convince the king, ever on the
lookout for Zionist-Bolshevik conspiracies, that Sadat was not
another Nasser. Adham had close ties to both Faisal and Sadat. As the
brother of Faisal’s wife Iffat, the spy chief led a group of senior advis¬
ers who argued that Sadat’s membership in the Muslim Brotherhood

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice • 15

indicated, at the very least, a “right-wing temperament.” 5 At the same
time, the wily Adham had business ties to Sadat, recognizing that the
Egyptian president had a taste for the finer things in life and letting
Sadat know that Saudi Arabia could provide them. In the 1960s, the
Saudi intelligence chief had formed a series of profitable joint business
ventures with Anwar Sadat’s wife, Jihan, giving the new Egyptian
leader a personal stake in better ties between Cairo and Riyadh. 6 King
Faisal designated Adham as his go-between, and less than a month
after Nasser died, Faisal sent Adham to Cairo. Apparently, Adham
arrived not only with promises of Saudi aid, but also with a secret
American assurance that Washington would help Egypt get its land
back from Israel, if Sadat would only break with Moscow and order
the withdrawal of the Soviet forces from Egypt. 7

By early 1971, Adham had become a ubiquitous presence in the
Egyptian capital. Mohammed Heikal, the pro-Nasser journalist and
editor of Al Abram, who was appointed minister of information in
1970 but resigned from government in 1974 over differences with
Sadat, observed, “This was not something to reassure the Russians.” 8
Not only was Adham acting as an intermediary for Faisal, but he was
also secretly working as a conduit for communications between Sadat
and Kissinger. 9 In his memoirs, Kissinger describes the connection,
noting that the Saudi role allowed Sadat and Nixon to stay in touch
while “bypassing both foreign ministries.” 10 At the time, the United
States had no embassy in Cairo; Egypt, like most Arab countries, had
broken diplomatic relations with the United States after the 1967 war.
Saudi Arabia had not. So in effect, Saudi Arabia was the broker for
U.S.-Egyptian relations in the early 1970s.

In May 1971, Sadat took the first step in consolidating power and
purging the government of its Nasserists. Claiming to have evidence
of a plot to assassinate him by Nasser-era officials, whom Sadat called
“Soviet agents,” Sadat struck. Joined by Ashraf Marwan, a wily
Egyptian bureaucrat who was a close friend of Adham’s, Sadat
arrested the speaker of the National Assembly, the war minister, the
information minister, the minister of presidential affairs, members of
the Central Committee, and other senior officials, whose “inane
socialist slogans” were “at variance. . .with our religious faith.” 11

52. • Devil’s Game

Sadat called it “the Second Revolution.” A year later, coordinating
with Adham, Sadat ordered the expulsion of Soviet forces.

“Kamal Adham persuaded Sadat to kick the Russians out of
Egypt,” says the CIA’s Raymond Close, who worked closely with
Adham. 12 Sadat, of course, was already predisposed to do so. But
Adham offered cash and Islamist backing.

On Sadat’s invitation, and with Kamal Adham’s and King Faisal’s
support, key members of the exiled Muslim Brotherhood leadership
began returning to Egypt. In addition, after 1971 Sadat freed large
numbers of Brotherhood prisoners. Many of them were angry and
even more committed to violence and secretive underground organiz¬
ing, and immediately disappeared to build their movement. Others,
particularly those of the older generation, sought to establish them¬
selves as overt allies of the new Egyptian president. Omar Telmassani,
freed in 1971, was a lawyer and future editor of The Call, the Muslim
Brotherhood’s journal, who would eventually become the organiza¬
tion’s supreme guide. Upon his release, he went directly to Sadat’s
presidential palace to inscribe his thanks, along with those of other
members of the Muslim Brotherhood, in the public registry. 13

The Islamic Community

Throughout the decade, the Muslim Brotherhood metastasized and
divided into various factions and competing currents. On the surface
at least, the old guard appeared to put a premium on moderation.
Many of the older Muslim Brotherhood officials who’d fled to Saudi
Arabia returned to Egypt as prosperous and well-connected business¬
men. In contrast, fiery younger members, especially those on cam¬
puses, spun off mini-Muslim Brotherhood clubs and organizations.
These groups, with the full support of Sadat and the Egyptian security
and intelligence services, proliferated rapidly. Soon they became
known as the Islamic Community. 14 Because Sadat did not formally
legalize the Muslim Brotherhood organization, the movement spread
willy-nilly, with no central leadership.

For the Egyptian leader, supporting the growth of these proto-
Islamic Community groups on campuses was merely one more way of

The Sorcerer's Apprentice • 153

using Islam to consolidate his power. “To escape living in Nasser’s
shadow, Sadat shifted gears and made strong appeals to Islam,”
according to John Esposito. He added:

Sadat assumed the title of the Believer-President, an allusion to the
Islamic caliph’s titled Commander of the Faithful. He began and
ended his speeches with verses from the Quran. TV broadcasts fre¬
quently featured him in a mosque, cameras zeroing in on his
prominent prayer mark, a callus caused by touching the forehead
to the ground in prayer . 15

Islamic Community student gangs received behind-the-scenes sup¬
port from Sadat’s secret police. “After December 1972. the fortunes of
the Islamist students took a turn for the better,” wrote Kepel. “They
finally found the key to success: discreet, tactical collaboration with
the regime to break the left’s domination of the campuses.” 16 Like
Islamist groups everywhere, they used heavy-handed tactics, violence,
and intimidation against their opponents, and they often had signifi¬
cant financial backing from Saudi Arabia and from right-wing Egyp¬
tian businessmen. “The jama’at islamiyya [Islamic Community] were
Islamist student associations that became the dominant force on
Egyptian university campuses during Sadat’s presidency,” wrote
Kepel. “They constituted the Islamist movement’s only genuine mass
organizations.” Soon chants of “Democracy!” clashed with “Allahu
Akbar 7 ” in student demonstrations. A few years later, the Islamic
Community groups had virtually seized control of universities in
Egypt and forced the left-wing groups into hiding. 17

One of Sadat’s aides played a critical role in getting the Islamic
Community up and running. Mohammed Uthman Ismail, a former
lawyer, had in 1971 worked closely with the Egyptian president as he
outmaneuvered and then locked up his opponents on the left. Ismail is
“considered to have acted as the godfather of the jama’at islamiyya,
in Cairo from late 1971 and throughout Middle Egypt beginning in
1973.” 18 In 1973, Ismail was appointed governor of Asyut, long a
stronghold of the Islamists, from which post he continued to urge
the Islamic Community groups to “fight against the communists.”
Reminiscent of the early days of the Muslim Brotherhood, when the

54 ' Devil’s Game

muscular Rovers and the terrorist Secret Apparatus grew out of ath¬
letic camps for boys and young men, the i970s-era Islamic Commu¬
nity organized government-sponsored summer camps. The first one
was held at Cairo University in 1973, where Sadat sent a high govern¬
ment official to signal the regime’s support. The camps were held with
increasing frequency over the next several years. In 1974 Sadat
reorganized the rules governing the Egyptian Student Union, to allow
the Islamic Community to take over that important institution. One
government decree declared that henceforth the chief purpose of the
Student Union would be “to deepen religious values among the stu¬
dents.” The takeover of the Student Union would be only the first of
many: professional associations of doctors, lawyers, engineers, and
other guilds would soon fall, too, and, of course, the redoubt of A 1
Azhar would be captured by the right once again, ending the role it
had been developing as a more balanced, and non-fundamentalist,
Islamic center. In 1973, the Muslim World League, that powerful
instrument of Saudi Islamization efforts, concluded a pact with Al
Azhar, pulling that venerable institution into the orbit of the Wah¬
habis. 19 That same year, Sadat also created the post of deputy prime
minister for religious affairs and established a Supreme Committee
for Introducing Legislation According to the Sharia. Islamists intro¬
duced bills in the National Assembly to prohibit alcohol, to use
sharia-based punishments, and for mandatory teaching of religion in
schools. 20

An astute observer of that period, Abdel Moneim Said, director of
Egypt’s Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, says that
the influence of Saudi Arabia in Egypt during the early 1970s was per¬
vasive. Many Egyptians went to work in Saudi Arabia, and returned
having imbibed conservative, Wahhabi theology, he says. Saudi Ara¬
bia also lavishly funded Egyptian institutions, desperate for funding.
“It moved Al Azhar to the right, and to publish extremely conserva¬
tive views. Many Saudi Arabian NGOs donated money to Egyptian
mosques, and that was also moving them to the right,” says Said.
“And many Egyptian journalists were on the Saudi payroll, secretly,
of course.”

According to Said, the Saudi influence also had an effect on Egyptian

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice • 155

law. “Egyptian judicial thinking changed—from the 192.0s to the
1960s it was so moderate, enlightened,” he says. “But by the 1970s,
those who’d been to the Gulf started coming back and brought with
them a narrow-minded interpretation of the law. Egyptian percep¬
tions of Saudi Arabia were changing, too. Saudi Arabia always feared
the impact of Egypt on Saudi Arabia, but now it was working in
reverse. Habits began to change, ways of thinking about life, about
separation of males and females,” he says. 21

The Ramadan War

In October 1973, Anwar Sadat launched a surprise attack, coordi¬
nated with Syria, on Israeli-occupied Egyptian and Syrian territory. It
turned out to be an abject military failure, but a resounding political
success. And, because it was laden with Muslim themes and begun
during Ramadan, the holiest month in the Islamic calendar, the war
ratcheted up the level of Islamist fervor in Egypt.

After some initial battlefield victories, during which Egyptian
troops crossed the Suez Canal and advanced against Israeli forces in
the Sinai peninsula, Egypt suffered massive reverses when Israel’s
Ariel Sharon struck back. The Israelis surrounded and cut off an
entire Egyptian army on the western side of the canal, precipitating a
U.S.-USSR confrontation, a worldwide nuclear alert, and a crisis that
was perhaps the closest the world came to Armageddon during the
Cold War.

But for Sadat the war had important consequences. First, it led to
an engagement with the United States to arrange the cease-fire and
then the disengagement agreements, which cemented the U.S.-
Egyptian alliance of the 1970s. Second, it confirmed the ties between
Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which led to the Arab oil embargo of 1973-
74. With its newfound, Croesus-like riches from the OPEC price
increases of those years, Saudi Arabia suddenly found itself with vir¬
tually unlimited resources to advance the cause of Wahhabi funda¬
mentalism. And third, the 1973 Arab-Israeli war burnished Sadat’s
Islamic credentials and bolstered the ability of the believer-president
to cloak himself in the garb of a Muslim holy man fighting a holy war.

56 • Devil’s Game

In many ways, the 1973 war marks the rebirth of the Islamist move¬
ment. Egypt referred to the October war as the “War of Ramadan,”
the Muslim holy month. Its troops were indoctrinated for the battle
with Islamic pep talks about liberating the A 1 Aqsa Mosque in Jeru¬
salem. “When Egyptian troops crossed the canal,” says Hermann
Eilts, the U.S. ambassador, “they were shouting ‘Allahu Akbar .'" 11

Symbolically, the 1973 war was designed to avenge the 1967
defeat. That war, implied Sadat’s propagandists, marked the failure of
Nasserism and Arab socialism. The imams had long decried the 1 967
defeat as one brought on by Nasser’s lack of piety and his disparage¬
ment of Islam. In contrast, and to rally the support of the Islamic
right, Sadat portrayed the mythical triumph of the 1973 war as a sign
of Islam’s power. Despite the fact that the Ramadan War had not
defeated Israel, and despite the fact that Egypt nearly suffered the cat¬
astrophic loss of an entire army, the Egyptian crossing of the Suez
Canal was touted as a landmark event. Desperate for a victory, con¬
servative Muslims worldwide compared the Ramadan War to the
great military victories of Islam’s first centuries, when Muslim rule
was extended to Central Asia and Spain and its armies hammered at
the gates of France and Austria. It’s safe to say that Sadat didn’t
expect to conquer Israel, or even to liberate the Sinai. Sadat’s war was
planned as a “limited” war, with strictly political motivations. To this
day, it’s unknown whether or not some U.S. officials deliberately plot¬
ted with Sadat, or at least tolerated his saber-rattling, in order to com¬
plete the Cold War reorientation of Egypt—at Israel’s expense. What is
certain, however, is that the CIA was fully aware of Sadat’s war plans,
and so was Kamal Adham, the Saudi intelligence chief. Indeed, months
before the war was launched, Adham and the Saudi intelligence service
outlined for the CIA the plan for the Ramadan War, including Saudi
Arabia’s decision to use the so-called oil weapon, and the CIA station
in Saudi Arabia dutifully reported all this to Washington. 23

Martha Kessler, one of the CIA’s most perceptive analysts of politi¬
cal Islam, says that the war marked a turning point. “The 1973 Arab-
Israeli war was fought under the banner of Islam, and that period
marks the serious disillusionment in the Arab world with European
ideas, including communism, Baathism, and Nasserism,” she says.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice • 157

“None of these ideas were very inspired in the first place, and more
important, weren’t working. So the idea to base that war on Islam
was very intentional: units were renamed, call signals changed, and so
on, all to reflect Islamic themes. I mark the rise of political Islam, at
least for this cycle, with the war.” 24

But the return of political Islam to Egypt proved double-edged.
Underneath the piety, conservative dress, and sharia-style juridical
rulings, unbeknownst either to Sadat or to the CIA, dangerous new
forces were gathering momentum.

The Qutb Factor

Toward the end of the 1970s, and especially after Sadat made his trip
to Jerusalem and began talking to Israel, the Islamic right became
increasingly radicalized and many of them moved into outright oppo¬
sition to Sadat—or plotted secretly. While backing the Islamists might
have seemed like a clever idea to Sadat at the time, it was too clever by
half. Even as the militants of Egypt’s Islamic Community battered
Sadat’s political rivals on the left, they fell increasingly under the spell
of radical, independent new imams who preached not only an anti¬
communist message, but an anti-Western one.

The first inkling that something might be wrong came as early as
1974, when a gang of Islamists, mostly Egyptians but led by a Pales¬
tinian, sparked a bloody uprising at the military’s Technical College,
an event that was supposed to have led to the assassination of Sadat.
Many were killed, and more arrested, and Sadat officially blamed the
revolt on Libya. Its leader, Salih Sirriya, was from a small town near
Haifa, Israel, which was the birthplace of the founder of the Islamic
Liberation Party, a far-right group dedicated to restoring the Islamic
caliphate, and which had close ties to Said Ramadan and the Muslim
Brotherhood. Sirriya was, most likely, an adherent of the Liberation
Party. 25 According to Gilles Kepel,

Sirriya lived in Jordan until 1970. He then spent a year in Iraq, but
finally had to flee Baghdad, where he was sentenced in absentia in
1972 for membership in the party. He then moved to Cairo. When

58 • Devil’s Game

he arrived in Cairo Sirriya began frequenting the Muslim Brethren,
especially Supreme Guide Hudaybi and Zaynab al-Ghazali, the
movement’s passionaria. He won her confidence and had regular
discussions with her. 26

According to Said, when Egyptian investigators examined the events
at the college, they found disturbing signs of profound, underlying
shifts among the cadets. “When they did a review,” he says, “they
found things had been changing at the Technical College: much more
praying, separation of groups, signs of extremism.” But so intent was
Sadat on mobilizing Islamic fervor that neither Egypt’s intelligence
service nor the CIA picked up on the trend. 27 “The leader of the Mus¬
lim Brotherhood at the time was a man named Telmassani, who had
been in jail, whom Sadat had freed, and freed on the understanding
that they would—well, let me use the term ‘behave,’ ” says Eilts. “And
they did. Occasionally there would be an article in one of the Muslim
Brotherhood publications that would criticize the government, and it
would be closed for a month, and Sadat felt that the question of con¬
trolling the reemergence of the Muslim Brotherhood organization
was no great problem.” 28

But while the official Muslim Brotherhood remained ostensibly doc¬
ile, the underground and student-based Islamic Community groups and
offshoots were preparing for war. Over the next years, these militants
would patiently build their forces in Egypt, occasionally engaging in
spectacular violence or assassinations. “Many Islamists began to live
alone, to go out to the desert, to build their movement,” says Said.
“Egyptian intelligence missed it.” 29 In 1977, Islamic terrorists assassi¬
nated the Egyptian minister of religious endowments, and began to
face repression and arrest, yet they continued to proliferate. When
Sadat stunned Egypt by going to Jerusalem in 1977 to seek a deal with
Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister, Egypt’s Islamists—
including the Brothers and the Islamic Community gangs—would
move toward even more militant opposition.

Many of Egypt’s Islamic radicals were followers of Sayyid Qutb,
who was hanged by Nasser in 1966. During the 1960s, Qutb had
developed a radical theory that compared Muslims who did not

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

follow the ultra-orthodox views he espoused to the barbarian nomads
of Arabia who existed in a state of “ignorance” before the arrival of
the prophet. Qutb and his followers used this theory as a justifica¬
tion for assassination of Arab leaders who were less than devout.
Although Qutb’s theories were confused and inconsistent, some West¬
ern Orientalists hailed him as a thoughtful critic of secularism in the
Middle East. It was Qutb, and his book. Signposts, that inspired the
most radical (and the most violent) Egyptian Islamists, mostly outside
the purview of both Egyptian intelligence and the CIA.

According to Eilts, Sadat failed to see any danger in encouraging
radical-right Islamic groups, but some others in his immediate circle
did, including his wife, Jihan. “Sadat, who had been, after all, a Mus¬
lim Brother earlier, took the view that the growing influence of Islam
and the Muslim Brotherhood, especially in the universities, was no
more than young people expressing their views,” says Eilts. But he
adds: “I remember many people, including his wife, saying, ‘You have
to watch these people,’ and saying that they are dangerous, and he
would just wave his hand and say, ‘Oh, they are just young people.’
He simply did not believe that their interest in religion and the Mus¬
lim Brotherhood represented a threat, and he could not be persuaded
by some of his ministers that they were.” 30

So, too, few U.S. diplomats or CIA officers truly understood the
depth of the Muslim Brotherhood’s penetration of Egyptian society in
the late 1970s, nor did they grasp the fuzzy relationship among the
official Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Community, and the under¬
ground groups and followers of Qutb. Eilts, along with U.S. intelli¬
gence officers in Egypt, observed the Islamicization of Egypt, but
found it hard to read. After all, Sadat was encouraging it, and the
Egyptian leader seemed to believe that it was both useful and ulti¬
mately harmless. “There was an awareness that some elements of the
religious movement were troublesome,” says Eilts. “I took the view
that it was something that had to be watched carefully.” But Eilts
believed that the Egyptian government could control the phenome¬
non, and that the more established, conservative leaders of the Mus¬
lim Brotherhood, such as Telmassani, were averse to violent tactics
and militant actions. “Telmassani denounced [the radicals], but did

:6o • Devil’s Game

he mean it?” asks Eilts, rhetorically. The ambassador believed that
there was an overlap between the Muslim Brotherhood leadership
and the militants, but he couldn’t be sure. “It was hard to tell,” he
says. “So one had to rely to some extent on the judgment of the presi¬
dent, and the ministers.” 31

The CIA hardly fared better. A senior CIA official who spent many
years in the Middle East, including several years in Cairo in the
1970s, says that some of Egypt’s own intelligence people warned him
not to underestimate the danger from the Islamists. “I had a good
friend, a senior Egyptian intelligence officer, who once told me: ‘You
people have got to understand the power of the mosque. We are going
to lose control, and people will believe only in the mosque.’ ” 32 Kathy
Christison, who joined the CIA in 1971 and headed the CIA’s Egypt
desk from 1973 to 1977, says that the potential danger of Islamism in
Egypt during those years wasn’t something that the agency worried
about. “I’d heard about the Muslim Brotherhood, of course, but there
was very little emphasis on Islam,” she says. “It was very easy to
ignore Islam at the time.” 33 There is no question that a major reason
why the Islamic right in Egypt was ignored is because American intel¬
ligence and policy officials had for decades seen fit to view Islamism as
an anti-Soviet force.

Eilts says that during his tenure as ambassador, from 1974—when
Egypt and the United States reestablished diplomatic ties—until 1979,
it was difficult for the embassy and the CIA to meet with or otherwise
contact the Islamists, especially those who were now starting to adopt
explicitly anti-government positions. “The government took a dim
view of open contacts between the United States and opposition
forces, on the grounds that it would encourage the opposition forces
to believe that they were supported by the United States,” says Eilts.
“So one had to handle these things very carefully, meeting these
people at receptions given by others.” During Kissinger’s shuttle
diplomacy in the wake of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Eilts says, the
United States promised Sadat that the CIA would not act clandes¬
tinely against Egypt. “So that limited the intelligence that we could
get,” he adds. “You can talk about covert contacts [with Islamists],
but it’s a little hard to get them arranged.” 34

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice • x 6

Besides, the CIA wasn’t exactly well equipped to go hobnobbing
with bearded, radical Egyptian imams and violence-oriented Islamic
Community activists. Reflecting a problem that has plagued the CIA
for decades, the agency lacked the requisite skills: few non-Western
case officers, few fluent Arabic speakers, few people with credentials
in Islamic history and culture. One CIA officer who served in the
Middle East, and who did not want his name used, tells an illustrative
story of one doomed effort to grapple with Islamism. “I remember
seeing this little office, run by this red-headed officer, who told me
that his office was in charge of ‘penetrating fundamentalist Islam,’ ”
he says, laughing. “And I remember thinking, Don’t give me a red¬
headed Irishman to go out and ‘penetrate’ Islam. It requires a great
deal of planning and strategy and understanding. I don’t think there is
a tougher intelligence problem to deal with, unless you’re a Muslim
and you can go to the mosque and talk to these people and get your
hands around the problem. And we didn’t do it.” 35

For the Islamic right, the 1970s was a decade of transition. The
sort of Islamic fundamentalism that the United States had known
since the end of World War II still existed—and still exists today. But
alongside it, a new and more virulent strain was taking shape. In
Egypt, it took the form of the Islamic Community’s radicals, who
later formed the core of Islamic Jihad, led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, A 1
Qaeda’s number two leader. In Iran, it was represented by the ultra¬
militant Shiite fundamentalists who formed the radical wing of Aya¬
tollah Khomeini’s movement. And in Saudi Arabia, the austere desert
home of the Wahhabi, it gave rise to Osama bin Laden and his follow¬
ers, who considered even Saudi Arabia’s orthodox clergy false and
impious Muslim pretenders.

The State Department and the CIA failed to pick up on the tran-
substantiation of the Islamic right in the 1970s. Instead, they saw
what they wanted to see: a political Islam that was conservative, anti¬
communist, and content to busy itself with the finer points of sharia
as interpreted by its bearded scholars. A handful of American special¬
ists on Islam and the Middle East argued that the Islamic right was
not only anti-communist but anti-democratic, anti-Western, and
prone to violence, but in the late 1970s that was a minority view.

6 z • Devil’s Game

Even after the stunning events of the next several years—the revolu¬
tion in Iran, the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Sadat’s assas¬
sination, Hezbollah’s truck bomb in Lebanon that killed 241 U.S.
Marines—the Islamic right was still viewed as an ally, above all dur¬
ing the Afghan jihad.

Part of the reason why Islamism continued to have appeal in the
West was the rise of Islamic economics in the 1970s. Many of the very
same militants whose acolytes engaged in terrorism also wore suits,
built businesses, founded banks, and appeared to all the world to be
nothing more than prosperous, if pious, citizens. Yet the businesses and
banks generated both profits and extremist followers of the prophet.

The Brotherhood’s Bank

Besides politics, economics played a critical role in the spread of
Islamism in Egypt in the 1970s. When Sadat came to power in 1970,
the clamorous vested interests of the pre-Nasser ancien regime—the
very same forces that the CIA had tried and failed to mobilize against
Nasser in the late 1950s—saw an opportunity to restore their wealth
and political connections. Many of them, especially the semi-feudal
landowning families, whose power had been reduced but not elimi¬
nated, maintained close ties to the Islamic right. Indeed, across the
Middle East, from Pakistan and Iran to Turkey and Egypt, the big
landowning families and the bazaar, the wealthy merchant families,
had intimate ties to Islamists. In many cases, they were family ties: a
wealthy landowner, or bazaari, might have a brother or cousin who
was an imam, mullah, or ayatollah. And they worked hand in hand.

The Brotherhood became big supporters of Sadat’s plan to expand
free enterprise in Egypt, and they enthusiastically joined in support of
Sadat’s new economic policy of openness, or infitah. From the out¬
side, the infitah was driven by the austerity-minded demands of the
International Monetary Fund. During the 1960s and 1970s, the IMF
forced brutal changes in many Third World economies, as a condition
for receiving international loans. These so-called conditionalities led
to severe economic pain in country after country, as subsidies were
eliminated, jobs lost, and industries privatized. Often, IMF policies

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

led regimes into confrontations with the left and with labor unions.
Egypt was no exception. The IMF’s strict demands for austerity and
cutbacks were the direct result of vigorous U.S. efforts to encourage
free-enterprise economics in the Third World and to combat social¬
ism. In Egypt, right-wing Islamists and conservative business owners
quickly found common cause.

The Call, the magazine of the newly liberated Muslim Brotherhood,
received substantial financial support from wealthy Egyptian rightists.
Businesses capitalizing on Sadat’s infitah policy provided the bulk of the
magazine’s advertising. “Out of the total of nearly 180 pages of color
advertising in al-Dawa [The Call], 49 were bought by real-estate pro¬
moters and entrepreneurs, 52 by chemical and plastics companies, 20 by
automobile importers, 12 by ‘Islamic’ banks and investment companies,
and 45 by food companies,” according to Gilles Kepel. Forty percent of
the magazine’s ads came from just three companies controlled by Mus¬
lim Brotherhood members who’d made fortunes in Saudi Arabia. 36

Interviewed in an Egyptian weekly, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Tel-
massani was forced to admit that “most of the commanding levers of
the policy of economic opening ( infitah ) are now in the hands of former
Muslim Brethren who were in exile and have now returned to Egypt.” 37

In 1974, the Muslim Brotherhood formally issued a declaration
commanding its members to support Sadat’s pro-IMF infitah. Such an
action was true to form for political Islam. Throughout their history,
Islamists have always been militantly pro-capitalist, opposing class-
struggle politics on principle. Rarely did they rally support for the
poor, the disenfranchised, or the downtrodden. In Egypt, especially,
the Islamists did not make common cause with aggrieved workers or
farmers who failed to benefit from Sadat’s economic policies or whose
livelihoods were thrown into turmoil by the infitah; instead, they
engaged in strikebreaking, enthusiastically opposing trade unions and
intellectuals allied to the left.

The rise of so-called Islamic banks was central to the Islamization
of Egypt’s economy. Organized on the questionable principle that
ordinary commercial banks do not operate according to Islamic law,
especially because that law supposedly does not allow interest to be
charged on loans, Islamic banks often disparaged their non-Islamic

64 • Devil’s Game

competitors for being irreligious, and even, most offensively, for being
“Jewish.” They used an insidious tactic to market their services,
warning that users of conventional banks were anti-Islam and were
thus “destined to go directly to hell.” 38

The development of an “Islamic economy” in Egypt further encour¬
aged the spread of political Islam. Members of the Muslim Brother¬
hood drew on the financial and business resources of its wealthy
supporters to strengthen its social and political organizing. Wealthy
members of the Islamic right and Muslim Brotherhood operatives in
financial institutions directed funds to mosques, small businesses,
friendly media outlets, and other ventures that bolstered the commu¬
nity. Because the Brotherhood operates as a clandestine fraternity,
some of this could be done secretly, with a wink and a nod. Egypt’s
Islamic right still drew on Saudi support, but it was becoming finan¬
cially independent. Says a leading Egyptian analyst, “They created
many businesses and banks, and they had solidarity with each other.
A Muslim Brotherhood member is happy to give half his income to
the Muslim Brotherhood.” 39

The creation of the Faisal Islamic Bank of Egypt (FIBE) in 1976
reenergized the Muslim Brotherhood in that country, in tandem with
Sadat’s efforts to mobilize the Islamic right. The bank was the corner¬
stone of an empire of Islamic banks run by Prince Mohammed al-
Faisal of Saudi Arabia, a son of King Faisal, and it played a decisive
role in the Islamization of Egypt and the region.

By all accounts, Prince Mohammad was not a member of the
Brotherhood, in keeping with the policy of the Saudi royal family to
use the organization as an arm of its foreign policy, but to avoid get¬
ting too close to it. The prince tended to rely more on establishment
figures, including Egypt’s grand mufti, to gain legitimacy for the bank.
And he won Sadat’s support for a special law to charter the FIBE. 40
Among the founders of FIBE were former Egyptian prime minister
Abdel Aziz Hijazi, who would move on to become a leader of the
Islamic economic movement, and Uthman Ahmed Uthman, an ultra-
wealthy industrialist known as “the Egyptian Rockefeller” who
played a key part in bankrolling the Muslim Brotherhood’s resur¬
gence in the 1970s. 41 Influential Muslim Brotherhood members,

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice • 165

including Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Abdel-Latif al-Sharif, and Youssef Nada
all joined FIBE’s early board of directors. 42 Each one of these men
would play a critical role in the growth of Islamism not only in Egypt
but throughout the region. And each one, in later years, would hover
on the fringes of the most extreme wing of the Islamist movement.
The most notorious of FIBE’s founders was the blind Islamic scholar
and rabble-rouser Omar Abdul Rahman. Abdul Rahman was “spiri¬
tual adviser” to Islamic Jihad, the fundamentalist group whose mem¬
bers would murder Sadat. Later, Abdul Rahman would help the
CIA recruit martyrdom-seeking holy warriors for the anti-Soviet
Afghanistan jihad. He would then immigrate to the United States,
where he would be arrested and convicted for his role in the 1993
bombing of New York’s World Trade Center.

The Faisal Islamic Bank was given unprecedented state assistance
at its founding. The special law that authorized it guaranteed that the
bank could not be nationalized, that it would not be subject to stan¬
dard state banking regulations, that it would be exempt from many
taxes, and that it could operate in total secrecy. 43 The official who
presented the law to the Egyptian parliament was not the economics
minister but the minister of religious endowments. The passage of the
law sailed though parliament because even left-wing deputies were
afraid to appear to be “voting against Allah.” 44

Al-Sharif, who would be jailed by Egypt in the 1990s, was a notori¬
ous wheeler-dealer who traded on his connections to militant
Islamists. From his position at FIBE, he became involved with the fast-
and-loose Islamic Money Management Companies, which emerged in
the 1980s as go-go, free-market investment firms, offering rates of
return to investors that were significantly higher than those proffered
by traditional banks. An IMMC typically offered a 2.5 percent return,
double the usual rate at a bank. One of the first, and most important,
was the Al-Sharif Group, which “had ties to the Muslim Brothers.” 45
The IMMCs were highly political, and covertly intervened to support
Muslim Brotherhood—linked candidates in Egypt’s parliamentary
elections, especially in 1987. The high-flying IMMC system shattered
in the late 1980s, threatening the very foundation of the Islamic bank¬
ing network, and Faisal’s FIBE in particular. “It was rumored that

66 • Devil’s Game

Prince Mohammed al-Faisal loaded planes with billions of U.S. dol¬
lars, with orders that they be sent directly from Cairo airport to Faisal
Bank branches in order to meet the withdrawal demands of deposi¬
tors,” wrote Soliman. 46 In 1993, Saleh Kamel of Al-Baraka bought
the Al-Sharif Group for $170 million.

Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood activist in
Qatar, was another FIBE founder. Qaradawi is widely known in the Arab
world for his militant, table-thumping speeches, which circulate on cas¬
settes. He is a vocal supporter of suicide bombers against Israel and, after
the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he issued proclamations to justify the murder of
U.S. civilians there. But Qaradawi tones down his extremist rhetoric
when talking to Western audiences. In 2004 he was invited to attend a
Brookings Institution-organized international forum on Islam.

Perhaps the most important of the FIBE Muslim Brotherhood
founders is Youssef Nada. Nada, one of the original, pre-Nasser
members of the Brotherhood, was implicated in a 1954 assassination
attempt against the Egyptian leader, and like Said Ramadan, Nada
escaped Egypt, fleeing to Germany and then to Italy. Along with other
Muslim Brotherhood veterans, Nada helped found the Bank A 1
Taqwa (“Fear of God”), with centers in the Bahamas, Italy, and
Switzerland. A 1 Taqwa is seen as the Muslim Brotherhood’s semi¬
official bank. Abdelkader Shoheib, an Egyptian journalist who spent
years following Nada, observes, “Initially, A.T. Bank was conceived
as a central economic instrument of the Muslim Brotherhood, in par¬
ticular its international branch.” The international branch was long
associated with Said Ramadan, who is the son-in-law of Hassan al-
Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Geneva, and who
founded the Islamic Center in Geneva, Switzerland. A 1 Taqwa was
“directed by Youssef Nada,” said Shoheib. 47 A confidential list of
Bank A 1 Taqwa’s founders included leaders of the Muslim Brother¬
hood in Syria and Tunisia, along with Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who served
as “president of A.T.’s office of religious affairs.” 48 Many of those
connected to the FIBE-Taqwa circles would later turn up in the inves¬
tigation of A 1 Qaeda and its allies. In 2001, Nada was designated by
the U.S. Department of the Treasury as a terrorist financier. 49

FIBE’s connection to radical Islamists wasn’t the only thing that

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice • 167

helped bring it down in the 1980s. The bank also enjoyed an intimate
relationship with the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce Inter¬
national (BCCI), otherwise known as the “Bank of Crooks and Crim¬
inals International.” BCCI, owned by Pakistani and Gulf investors,
was notoriously involved in helping to finance terrorism, gunrunning,
drug trafficking, and unadulterated financial chicanery until its spec¬
tacular collapse in 1988. The CIA was a frequent BCCI customer,
using the bank to deposit U.S. and Saudi funds to finance the
Afghanistan war—funds that supplied extremist Islamic militants tied
to the mujahideen there. BCCI, though not officially an Islamic bank,
made extensive use of Islamic bank credentials, language, and sym¬
bolism. When it crashed, investigators found that BCCI had $589 mil¬
lion in “unrecorded deposits,” of which $245 million “belonged to
the Faisal Islamic Bank of Egypt.” 50

After Sadat’s assassination, many of the radicals who’d been
placed in senior positions at FIBE were ousted, including Nada,
Qaradawi, and Al-Sharif. Egypt’s State Security Office specifically
asked Prince Mohammed that they be removed. 51 Yet the damage
was done. Prince Mohammed’s bank had helped institutionalize the
Islamic revival in Egypt, which fostered a violent underground of ter¬
rorists. During the 1980s and 1990s, this network would resist all
efforts by the government of Husni Mubarak to dismantle it.

Sadat’s death was the end of the road for the believer-president.
But by then, Iran was under the sway of Khomeini’s version of Islam,
the U.S.-backed jihad in Afghanistan was in full swing, and Islamism
had become the defining ideology of activists from North Africa to
deep in Soviet Central Asia. This extraordinary series of develop¬
ments were made possible in part by Sadat’s and America’s favorite
ally, Saudi Arabia. Now awash in tens of billions of petrodollars,
thanks to the 1970s oil-price increases imposed by the Organization
of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the Saudis used cold, hard cash to
build a pro-American empire of Islamic banks and financial institu¬
tions in Egypt, Sudan, Kuwait, Turkey, Pakistan, and elsewhere. It
was the marriage between the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology and
the power of Islamic banking that finally catapulted right-wing
Islamism to worldwide power.

THE RISE OF ECONOMIC ISLAM

In the 1970s, political Islam was bolstered by the explosion of a
parallel force: economic Islam. Part of the vast wealth pouring into
the Arab oil-exporting countries found its way into a network of
banks and investment companies controlled by the Islamic right and
the Muslim Brotherhood. In country after country, these Islamic
banks did much more than serve as money-changers. Sometimes
openly, sometimes secretly, they supported sympathetic politicians
and army officers and funded activists and political parties, Islamist-
run media companies, and businesses controlled by the Brotherhood.
From 1974 onward, the Islamic banking system served as the finan¬
cial backbone for the Islamic right.

And throughout it all, the Islamic banking system—which went
from zero to global powerhouse in the two decades after 1974—
depended heavily on the advice and technological assistance it
received from a host of American and European institutions, includ¬
ing such major banks as Citibank.

To Western bank executives, International Monetary Fund offi¬
cials, and free-market ideologues, the Islamic banks seemed ideal. The
Islamic right had long made clear that it preferred capitalism to athe¬
istic communism. None of the important Islamist movements, from

The Rise of Economic Islam • 169

the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to Pakistan’s Islamic Group to the
Shiite fundamentalists in Iraq, preached social and economic justice.
Instead, they opposed state ownership, land reform, and social welfare
programs.

Like the Muslim Brotherhood itself, Islamic banking was born in
Egypt, financed by Saudi Arabia, and then spread to the far corners
of the Muslim world. At first it seemed innocuous, a free-market-
oriented system of financial power that professed fealty to the Koran
but delivered cold, hard cash to its many supporters; soon enough, the
Islamist political dimension of Islamic banking made itself felt. Even¬
tually, the Islamic banking movement became a vehicle not only for
exporting political Islam, but for sponsoring violence. Often the
Islamic banks had direct or tacit support from Western banks and
governments.

At the beginning, the growth of economic Islam seemed to fit per¬
fectly with Washington’s Cold War design for the Middle East. It
emerged as a marriage between militant economic theoreticians of the
Islamic right in the Arab world and the technology and know-how of
several leading Western banks, financial institutions, and universities.
It began slowly in the 1950s, as Muslim Brotherhood economists and
two leading Iraqi clergymen developed the early prototypes for an
Islamic economy. It gathered momentum in the 1960s, when a Mus¬
lim Brotherhood financier founded the first Islamic bank. And it took
off in the 1970s, with the full support of Saudi, Kuwaiti, and Arab
Gulf potentates, especially after oil prices quadrupled in 1973-74.
Prince Mohammed al-Faisal, the brother of the Saudi foreign minister,
finally brought it all together, creating the first multibillion-dollar net¬
work of Islamic banks and building a reputation as Islam’s “prince of
tithes.” Throughout these years, the Islamic banking network was
organized, staffed, and often controlled by wealthy Muslim Brother¬
hood activists, who used the banks to finance right-wing political trans¬
formations in Egypt, Sudan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Turkey, and Jordan.

Economic Islam operated on two levels in the 1970s. First, Saudi
Arabia itself, wielding huge dollar surpluses, dangled these riches in
front of poverty-stricken Muslim nations such as Egypt, Turkey, Pak¬
istan, and Afghanistan, offering aid in exchange for a pronounced

7° • Devil’s Game

political shift to the right. Second, a tightly disciplined network of
Islamic banks set up shop in Cairo, Karachi, Khartoum, and Istanbul,
where they not only became important financial players but quietly
funded the growth of the Islamic right.

In Egypt, Islamic bankers joined Sadat to support that country’s
transition from Arab socialism to Sadat’s infitah (economic opening)
to restore free-market policies, and in the process they helped build
the political momentum of the Islamic right. In Kuwait, the royal fam¬
ily invited Muslim Brotherhood-linked bankers to fund a political
force against nationalists and Palestinians in that tiny oil emirate. In
Sudan, Jordan, and Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood and right-wing
politicians built financial empires on the foundation of Islamic banks
and used their wealth and connections to advance the cause of the
Islamic right. Often, as in Egypt, they identified their economic poli¬
cies with economic reforms demanded by the International Monetary
Fund and by inviting in multinational corporations and foreign
lenders.

Thanks to economic Islam, there was now a direct line from ultra-
wealthy Saudi, Kuwaiti, and Qatari sheikhs, princes, and emirs to
Muslim Brotherhood businessmen and bankers to street-level thugs of
the Islamic right—all of it fueled by petrodollars. It was a force that
transformed the Middle East.

Islamic Banks and the West

Big banks, oil companies, and U.S. government institutions eagerly
encouraged the Islamic bankers in the 1970s. The 1973 OPEC price
increases made the Gulf important not just because of its oil wells, but
for its financial clout as well. Vast quantities of U.S. military goods
poured into Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other Gulf countries. Egypt
joined traditional U.S. allies such as Israel and Turkey as outposts of
Western influence. And the United States and Great Britain began
constructing and expanding air and naval bases and bolstering fleets
in the Indian Ocean, the Horn of Africa, southern Arabia, and the
eastern Mediterranean.

The Rise of Economic Islam • 17]

Islamic clerics and medieval-minded Muslim Brotherhood scrib¬
blers didn’t get the Islamic banking movement off the ground on their
own. Western bankers, salivating at the prospect of tapping into the
vast stores of petrodollars that were accumulating after OPEC’s
1973-74 price increases, did more than play along. The big banks
were already major players with Saudi and Arab Gulf conventional
bankers, so when the Islamic banking movement emerged it seemed
too good an opportunity to miss. Major Western banks and financial
institutions pitched in to provide expertise, training, and the latest
banking technology to facilitate the explosion of Islamic-right bank¬
ing power. Reassured by Orientalists and academics who asserted that
Islam’s commitment to capitalism went back to Mohammed, the big
money center banks plunged in.

Major participants included Citibank; the Hong Kong and Shang¬
hai Banking Corporation; Bankers Trust; Chase Manhattan; the
disciples of the University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman; the Interna¬
tional Monetary Fund; Price Waterhouse; U.S., British, and Swiss
technicians; the major oil companies; Harvard University; and the
University of Southern California; among others. Creating a banking
system that didn’t charge interest, and yet still could function both
legally and efficiently in the world of global finance, was no mean
trick. It is beyond the scope of this book to discuss the theory of
Islamic finance, and the mechanisms that allowed non-interest
“lenders” to recoup their “loans” and still make a profit. Suffice it to
say that a complex and multilayered theory of exactly how to do just
that developed in the 1970s. 1 More important, for our story, is how
these banks propelled the growth of political Islam, with the con¬
nivance of Western bankers.

Ibrahim Warde, one of the keenest observers of the world of
Islamic finance concludes:

The international banking system was . . . instrumental in the very
creation of Islamic banks. The fledgling Islamic banks, lacking
experience and resources, had little choice but to rely on the
expertise of their international counterparts. And as Islamic banks
gained experience, the world of finance was undergoing major

[72. * Devil’s Game

transformations. So rather than being phased out, the cooperation
with Western banks—in the form of joint ventures, management
agreements, technical cooperation and correspondent banking—
was stepped up, leading to increased convergence and fusion
between conventional and Islamic finance .” 2

Some of the groundbreaking work on the development of a theory
of Islamic banking, including how to organize a modern bank using
non-interest-bearing securities, was being done in Pakistan, in Lon¬
don, and, in the 1960s, at the University of Chicago, by the economist
Lloyd Metzler. 3 By the 1970s, when petro-Islam took off, they were
ready.

“Citibank, Bankers Trust, Chase Manhattan, all the American
banks at the time were doing a lot of work for the Saudis, so when
this Islamic banking phenomenon started, it was seen as an opportu¬
nity to do business,” says Warde. “Goldman Sachs was active in cre¬
ating certain types of commodity-based products for Islamic banks.” 4
Between 1975 and 2000, U.S. institutions such as Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac did pilot projects for Islamic mortgages, the U.S. Federal
Reserve started Islamic banking programs, the World Bank’s Interna¬
tional Finance Corporation got involved, and even Big Oil used
Islamic financial instruments for project financing. “The large West¬
ern multinationals ... opened Islamic windows for receiving deposits
from their wealthy Gulf clients,” wrote Clement Henry. “The French,
led by Banque Nationale de Paris ... joined the many American and
British presences, headed by Citibank and Kleinworth Benson.” 5

In fact, Islamic banks set up headquarters in Europe and other
worldwide money centers. Islamic banking “operates more out of
London, Geneva or the Bahamas than it does out of Jeddah, Karachi
or Cairo,” according to Warde. It hewed closely to an alliance with
neoliberal economists. “Ideologically, both liberalism and economic
Islam were driven by their common opposition to socialism and eco¬
nomic dirigisme .” 6

Islamic finance repeatedly relied on right-wing economists and
Islamist politicians who advocated the privatizing, free-market views
of the Chicago School. “Even Islamic Republics have on occasion

The Rise of Economic Islam • 173

openly embraced neo-liberalism,” wrote Warde. “In Sudan, between
1992 and the end of 1993, Economics Minister Abdul Rahim
Hamdi—a disciple of Milton Friedman and incidentally a former
Islamic banker in London—did not hesitate to implement the harsh¬
est free-market remedies dictated by the International Monetary
Fund. He said he was committed to transforming the heretofore sta¬
tist economy ‘according to free-market rules, because this is how an
Islamic economy should function.’” 7 Similarly, the radical Algerian
Islamist movement, which would force that nation into a protracted
civil war in the 1990s, openly backed the International Monetary
Fund’s harsh prescription for Algeria. “When founded in 1989,”
wrote Clement Henry, an astute observer of Islamic finance, “the
Algerian Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) advocated market reforms in
its party program—including aligning the dinar [Algeria’s currency]
at international market rates as the IMF was insisting at the time—
and Islamic banking.” 8

Citibank was a pioneer. “Citibank became the first Western bank
to set up an Islamic window,” says Warde. 9 It would continue to pay
dividends. Shaukut Aziz, who served on the board of directors of Citi
Islamic Bank and the Citibank-connected Saudi American Bank, and
who spent thirty years as an Islamic banker, set up Citibank’s Islamic
banking program in Bahrain. 10 Aziz would eventually rise to become
minister of finance and economic affairs in Pakistan and, in 2004,
Aziz would be named Pakistan’s prime minister by President Pervez
Musharraf.

What excited Western free-market gurus was the notion that by its
nature Islam was a capitalist religion. Mohammed, the Prophet, was a
capitalist and profit-seeking trader who believed in free markets, low
taxes, private enterprise, and the absence of regulations, and his early
Islamic regime in Mecca obeyed rules that would make a neo-liberal
economist smile—or at least that is the portrait painted by Islamic
fundamentalists and by free-market ideologues from the West. It was
a portrait that not only justified Western support for the economic
projects of the Islamic right but provided yet another means to attack
Arab socialism, state-run enterprises, and dirigisme as “anti-Islamic.”
Though the idea of drawing upon seventh-century religious tracts and

i74 * Devil’s Game

fourteenth-century Islamic economic theories to build a modern eco¬
nomic system might seem laughable. Western bankers and secular-
minded Middle East politicians couldn’t resist the lure of the money
flaunted by Muslim Brotherhood financiers.

The Islamic Free Market Institute, a conservative foundation in
Virginia, issued a paper called “Islam and the Free Market,” which
captures the outlook perfectly. Citing scores of Koranic verses, IFMI
proclaimed that being a true Muslim means opposing socialism,
resisting taxes, respecting private property rights, and obeying the
unalterable law of supply and demand:

The Qur’an explicitly requires a free market of open trade based on
consensual, voluntary transactions.... Indeed, Islam commands
its followers to go out into the market and earn their livelihood and
profit, to support their families and enjoy prosperity... .

Islam specifically provides for private property rights. In con¬
trast to socialism, Islam enshrines private property in a sacred
Trust. Islam recognizes contract rights as well and the Qur’an
commands followers to fulfill their contractual promises.
Muhammad’s teachings also provided that prices should be deter¬
mined by supply and demand in the open marketplace and not set
arbitrarily by intervening officials. This reflected the long-
established merchant background of his tribe, as well as his own
merchant trading activities.... In his rule of the city of al-Madinah,
Muhammad explicitly chose not to impose any taxes on trade,
making the city an effective free-trade zone....

Islam’s thoroughly free-market economic policies produced
an enormous economic boom in the lands it governed, as has
always been true everywhere such policies have been tried. As a
result, while Europe remained mired in the anti-market feudalism
of the Dark Ages, the Islamic World would become the dominant
economic power on earth for almost 500 years. 11

The idea that the Koran somehow provides guidance that might be
used to outlaw socialism and to insist upon unfettered private enter¬
prise is unfounded, since its strictures are far from explicit and cer¬
tainly cannot be applied to modern economic systems. Yet that didn’t

The Rise of Economic Islam • 175

stop conservative Western economists from saying it did, and it didn’t
stop Muslim clergy, including well-known Iraqi and Iranian ayatol¬
lahs, from issuing legal rulings (or fatwas) to codify such narrow¬
minded interpretation.

Graham Fuller, a former CIA officer who headed the Middle East
desk at the CIA National Intelligence Council in the early 1980s, later
argued that America’s interests are not incompatible with the rise of
fundamentalist Islam. In the mid-1980s, as a CIA official, he authored
a controversial national intelligence estimate (NIE) that proposed that
the United States seek closer relations with Iran’s ayatollah-led regime
in order to prevent Soviet gains, a paper that contributed to the initia¬
tive by the Reagan administration’s Oliver North and William Casey
that became known as “Iran-contra.” Fuller, now a prolific author,
has also written extensively that the economic vision of the Islamic
right is friendly to free-market advocates. “There is,” he wrote, “no
mainstream Islamist organization ... with radical social views.” 12
Continued Fuller:

Islam does not favor, in principle, heavy state intervention in the
marketplace or in the economic profile of society... . Strangely,
Islamists remain quite ambivalent about or even hostile to social
revolution. 13

Islamists strongly oppose Marxist interpretations of soci¬
ety. 14 ... Islamists are ambivalent on the role of the state in the
economy—a disparity between theory and practice.... Classical
Islamic theory envisages the role of the state as limited to facilitat¬
ing the well-being of markets and merchants rather than control¬
ling them. Islamists have always powerfully objected to socialism
and communism.... Islam has never had problems with the idea
that wealth is unevenly distributed. 15

Islamic banking grew astronomically. According to the General
Council of Islamic Banks and Financial Institutions, by 2.004 there
were more than 270 Islamic banks with assets of $260 billion and
deposits of $200 billion. 16 Chief credit belongs to an Iraqi clergyman,
an Egyptian banker, a Saudi prince, and a cluster of Kuwaiti royals.
Their stories follow.

176 • Devil’s Game

The Ayatollah and the Prince

The man who laid the cornerstone for “economic Islam” was an Iraqi
Shiite clergyman named Mohammed Baler al-Sadr, the patriarch of
the Sadr family and a close relative of Iraqi rebel cleric Muqtada al-
Sadr, whose Mahdi Army emerged as a powerful force in Iraq in
2003. Ayatollah Sadr’s ideas provided the theoretical justification for
an Islamist economic policy.

In i960, Sadr wrote Our Economy, which became the Holy Bible
of Islamic fundamentalism’s economic theories. His Nonusurious
Banks in Islam (1973) was one of the first tomes explicating the basis
of Islamic banking. 17 Both works would be among the founding doc¬
uments for a pro-capitalist, and militantly anti-socialist, Islamist
political economy. It is not surprising that Muhammad Bakr al-Sadr
also helped found an underground, terrorist Islamist party, the Islamic
Call (A 1 Dawa) in the 1950s. The Call was established as an anti¬
communist force in Baghdad, organizing conservative Iraqi students
against Marxists on campus; later, it reportedly received covert sup¬
port from Iran’s SAVAK secret service in order to undermine the Baath
Party in Iraq, carrying out assassinations and bombings for decades
against Iraqi leaders.

Sadr’s partner in creating the Call was Ayatollah Muhsin al-
Hakim, founder of another long-lasting Iraqi fundamentalist political
dynasty, whose scions would also take part in the U.S.-installed
regime in 2003 through the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolu¬
tion in Iraq (SCIRI). Sadr and Hakim were the co-organizers of right-
wing political Islam in Iraq in the late 1950s. What propelled them to
organize their movement was the growth of left-wing activism in Iraq
and the strength of the Iraqi Communist Party. The communists and
the left were strongest among the disenfranchised Shiites of Iraq, espe¬
cially in the sprawling, Shiite-dominated slums of Baghdad. Accord¬
ing to a former CIA official, “Membership in the leftist organizations
during the period was so strong that one author on the period
describes the Communist Party in Iraq as the only political party that
represented the Shi’a.” 18 What frightened Sadr and Hakim was that

The Rise of Economic Islam • 177

hundreds of young Shiites, especially on university campuses, were
abandoning their allegiance to Islam and joining the socialists, the
communists, the Baath, or the pro-Nasser forces. Led by Ayatollah
Hakim’s son, Mahdi al-Hakim, the Call “was organized along strict
party lines. . . . The party functioned in secrecy, with small cells,
anonymity, and a strict hierarchy.” 19

Many of Iraq’s leading clerics had long-established ties to British
intelligence. For more than a century, London had maintained ties to
the Shiite clergy of Iraq and Iran, especially those based in the holy
city of Najaf, Iraq. From 1852 until the early 1950s, through a clever
financial mechanism called the Oudh Bequest, imperial England and
its intelligence service kept hundreds of Iraqi Shiite clergy in Najaf
and Karbala on the British payroll. 20 After the overthrow of England’s
Iraqi king in 1958, many of those ayatollahs began organizing against
the Iraqi left and the Iraqi Communist Party, and it was during this
period that the Islamic Call was founded, with direct ties to the Mus¬
lim Brotherhood in Egypt (despite the fact that the Brothers were
Sunni and the Iraqis were Shiites). 21 In i960 a joint Sunni-Shiite dec¬
laration representing something called the Islamic Party issued a
strong attack on the Iraqi government and its communist allies, an
attack that was endorsed by Ayatollah Hakim. Concluded Yitzhak
Nakash, the author of The Shi’is of Iraq, “Hakim not only supported
the memorandum, but himself issued a fatwa attacking communism
by name and asserting that it was incompatible with Islam.” 22

The anti-communist organizing and economic theorizing of the
two Iraqi Shiite ayatollahs inspired an iconoclastic young Saudi to
build the first Islamic banking empire: Prince Mohammed al-Faisal,
son of the late King Faisal and brother of Prince Saud al-Faisal, the
Saudi foreign minister. Prince Mohammed, the “prince of tithes” and
founder of the Faisal Group, the worldwide network of Islamic
banks, along with Saleh Kamel, the brother-in-law of then-Saudi
Crown Prince Fahd and a billionaire who created the A 1 Baraka bank¬
ing empire, pioneered the rapid expansion of economic Islam.

Prince Mohammed, Saleh Kamel, and their allies not only launched
the Islamic banking movement, but changed the face of the Middle
East. Not all Islamic bankers were political, and even fewer gravitated

78 • Devil’s Game

toward the violent Islamic-right fringe, but in practice it was hard to
tell them apart. Some Islamic banking circles were run by non-activist,
pious Muslims who simply spied an opportunity to make some money.
Many more were activists, who saw Islamic banking as a means to
advance the cause of militant, political Islam, and who used their
banks to support the Brotherhood and its allies. And still others either
founded Islamic banks, or utilized existing ones, as innocent-looking
fronts for terrorism, arms trade, and other skullduggery. Unfortu¬
nately for the CIA, and for Citibank, knowing which was which was
all but impossible—and often, all three worked together cheek by
jowl: the pious, the political, and the perpetrators.

Many of the leading Islamist activists of the last four decades were
involved with Islamic banking both in theory and practice, often
under the wing of Prince Mohammed al-Faisal. Many were connected
to the Brotherhood. Sayyid Qutb, the extremist from Egypt who was
hanged in 1966, wrote Social Justice in Islam, purporting to be a blue¬
print for how fundamentalist Muslims ought to look at economic the¬
ory. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian scholar of Islamic law, who
settled in the Wahhabi Gulf sheikhdom of Qatar, parlayed his reli¬
gious credentials into seats on the board of several Islamic banks.
Mohammed al-Ghazali, another Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader
who found a haven in the Gulf, wrote tracts on Islamic economics,
including Islam and Economic Questions.

In Egypt, the man who got it all started was Ahmed al-Najjar, a
German-trained Egyptian banker who, in 1963, created the Mit
Ghamr Bank, described as “the first Islamic bank in Egypt and the
world.” 23 Mit Ghamr was begun with German banking assistance
and, through Najjar’s family, with the support of forces within the
Egyptian intelligence service. It was done covertly. Neither the public
nor the Egyptian government were told that it was intended to be an
Islamic bank. 24 At the time, in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood was
Nasser’s nemesis, and Najjar took steps to distance himself, at least
publicly, from the violent underground movement. But Najjar was
certainly connected. The foreword to a book that he wrote describing
his experience as the pioneer of Islamic banking was written by Jamal
al-Banna, the brother of Hassan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood’s

The Rise of Economic Islam • 179

founder. “The main distinction between Dr. Najjar and [other] econo¬
mists ... is that he does not consider Islamic economics as a science or
a study, but as a cause for awakening the Muslims, and a method for
their renaissance. Therefore, he considers ‘Islamic banks’ only as a
base for his mission.” 25 Najjar himself wrote that the reason he started
the first Islamic bank was to “save the Islamic identity which was start¬
ing to fade away in our society... in preparation to shift to Marx¬
ism.” He bitterly attacked Nasser and bemoaned the fact that
Egyptians were “ashamed of Islam and proud of socialism or national¬
ism.” Yet in public, says Najjar, “I could not declare my true goals.” 26

The Muslim Brotherhood was deeply involved in Najjar’s work,
and many of its members invested in his early ventures. 27 By 1967, it
was clear that the Muslim Brotherhood had essentially taken over Mit
Ghamr, and the bank was closed. Egypt’s experiment with Islamic
banking in the 1960s was “liquidated,” says Monzer Kahf, when
“Islamic revivalists and former Muslim Brotherhood members infil¬
trated [it] as clients, depositors, and probably employees.” 28 At its
peak, Mit Ghamr had nine branches and 250,000 depositors. Najjar,
in his memoirs, blames Nasser for the undoing of his bank. Unde¬
terred, he went to Sudan, where he was welcomed by the Muslim
Brotherhood there. “The Society [of the Muslim Brothers] in the
Sudan was a harmonious Islamic and democratic civilian one,” he
wrote, specifically citing as his interlocutor there Hassan Turabi, the
leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan, who would rise to power
in the late 1970s. 29 When the Sudanese government was overthrown
by Jaafar Numeiri, who pledged loyalty to Nasser, Najjar fled.

Najjar traveled to Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emi¬
rates, and Malaysia, spreading the gospel of Islamic banking. He
would turn up over the next three decades virtually everywhere an
Islamic bank opened its doors. “He was a promoter of the idea of
Islamic banking to anyone who would listen to him,” says Abdelkader
Thomas, the founder of the American Journal of Islamic Finance,
who worked with Citibank on Islamic finance in Bahrain. When the
Saudi-backed Organization of the Islamic Conference created the
Islamic Development Bank (IDB) in Jeddah in 1975, Najjar was there.
The IDB was the granddaddy of Islamic banks, generously supported

8 o • Devil’s Game

by Saudi Arabia, Libya, Kuwait, and the UAE. It was quickly fol¬
lowed by the Dubai Islamic Bank (1975), the Kuwait Finance House
(1977), the Islamic Bank of Sudan (1977), the Jordan Islamic Bank
for Finance and Investment (1978), and the Bahrain Islamic Bank
(1978).

Najjar recruited his most important acolytes when he convinced
Prince Mohammed al-Faisal and Saleh Kamel to get into Islamic bank¬
ing. “It was the same guy,” says Thomas. “It was his meetings they
attended in the 1970s. Their ideas are similar because the same person
inspired them. They started at the same time, and many of the same
people worked with them.” 30 According to Najjar, he first encountered
Prince Mohammed at a meeting of the Islamic Development Bank in
the early 1970s. 31

Mohammed al-Faisal’s Islamic banking empire started with the
creation of the Faisal Islamic Bank of Egypt (FIBE) in 1976. Of all the
Islamic banks, FIBE was the most formal and carefully structured,
establishing a sharia board made up of carefully screened Egyptian
clergy. Prince Mohammed also founded the International Association
of Islamic Banks, created the Handbook of Islamic Banking, and set
up the global network called the “Faisal Group.” That group
included all or part of the Jordan Islamic Bank, the Faisal Islamic
Bank of Sudan (1978), and Faisal Finance House in Turkey (1985). In
1981, at an Islamic summit meeting in Taif, in Saudi Arabia, Prince
Mohammed put together the House of Islamic Funds (in Arabic, Dar
al-Maal al-Islami, or DMI), a huge holding company that served as
the nerve center of his empire. DMI, based in the Bahamas and with
its operations center in Geneva, at one point had subsidiaries in ten
countries, including Bahrain, Pakistan, Turkey, Denmark, Luxem¬
bourg, Guinea, Senegal, and Niger. 32

Saleh Kamel, meanwhile, was setting up his own empire, the Al-
Baraka Group. Kamel, a Saudi billionaire related to the royal family
by marriage, “sponsors an annual seminar at which scores of eco¬
nomists and bankers meet with sharia scholars.” 33 At Al Azhar, the
thousand-year-old Cairo center of Islamic learning, he established the
Saleh Kamel Center for Islamic Economic Studies. The managing
director of Al-Baraka Investment and Development Company was a

The Rise of Economic Islam • 181

leading Muslim Brotherhood member, 34 and its branches in Sudan,
Turkey, and elsewhere worked closely with the Brotherhood.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, both DMI and Al-Baraka found
strong allies in London, New York, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and off¬
shore money centers in such places as the Bahamas and the Cayman
Islands. Ibrahim Kamel, DMI’s vice chairman and CEO, told an
Islamic banking conference in Baden-Baden, West Germany, that the
very existence of DMI’s Geneva operations center could not have
occurred but for the assistance DMI received from Price Waterhouse:
“The people who explained [Islamic banking] to the Swiss Banking
Commission are Price Waterhouse, who have been auditing us for
over three years.” Literally dozens of conferences took place in West¬
ern money centers on Islamic banking, and prestigious academic insti¬
tutions got into the act. Eventually, even Harvard University would
join in, with its Harvard Islamic Finance Information Program, sup¬
ported financially by Western and Islamic banking circles.

Islamic banking provided a mechanism to bring together wealthy
conservatives, Islamist activists, and right-wing Islamic law scholars
in an environment that empowered all three. Islamic banking pro¬
vided the engine that made Islamic revivalism go. During the Cold
War, no thought was given to the notion that Islamic banking might
have a deleterious impact on Middle East societies, and that it might
boomerang against the West. Timur Quran, the Turkish author of
Islam and Mammon, points out now that Islamic economics “has
promoted the spread of anti-modern and in some respects deliberately
anti-Western currents of thought all across the Islamic world .” 35

The most vivid description of how Islamic banking fostered the
expansion of political Islam appears in the writing of Monzer Kahf, a
radical Islamist from Syria. Kahf, who received a Ph.D. in economics
from the University of Utah, graduated from the University of Damas¬
cus and studied Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). From 1975 to 1981,
Kahf ran the financial affairs of the Islamic Society of North America,
a militant Muslim fundamentalist organization based in Indiana with
close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. After a stint as a banker in New
York, Kahf went to work for the Islamic Research and Training Insti¬
tute of the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) in Jeddah, from 1985 to

8 z ■ Devil’s Game

1999. Since then, Kahf has been a consultant and lecturer on Islamic
finance in California, and has written widely on the subject.

In a paper presented to the 2002 Harvard Forum on Islamic
Finance and Banking, Kahf describes how the big Islamic banks forged
a political-economic alliance with the Muslim clergy, the ulema.

The formal systematic contact between bankers and sharia schol¬
ars came during the almost concurrent preparation for the estab¬
lishment of Islamic banks in Egypt and Jordan in the second half
of the 1970s.

When the new species of international Islamic Investment
Funds emerged, though managed by Western bankers, brokers,
and houses of finance, they had to get sharia scholars on board,
too, in order to gain acceptance and legitimacy. The many semi¬
nars, meetings, conferences, and symposia that ensued since the
mid-1970s in the four corners of the world have further enhanced
this new alliance between Islamic bankers and sharia scholars and
developed mutually rewarding working relationships.

From the point of view of the ulema, this new alliance brings
them back to the forefront of the political scene at a time when
they needed this boost very much.... This alliance also gives the
ulema a new source of income and a window to a new lifestyle
that includes air travel, sometimes in private jets, staying in five-
star hotels, being under the focus of media attention, providing
their opinions to people of high social and economic rank, who
come running for listening, being commissioned to undertake
paid-for fiqh research. ... They in fact became celebrities in their
respective countries, and even outside their borders.

The alliance creates an atmosphere of fresh political rap¬
prochement by the Islamic movement and the governments in the
Muslim, and especially the Arab, countries. 36

By rapprochement, Kahf means the Islamization of social and politi¬
cal society in the Islamic world. Kahf adds that the sharia scholars
who were picked for the advisory boards and other posts were care¬
fully selected. Those who were too radical, and who wouldn’t be
accepted by moderate government officials and Western bankers,
were avoided; at the same time, the “government-cheering ulema”

The Rise of Economic Islam • 183

were similarly excluded. 37 The process created an entire new class of
wealthy, right-wing Islamists, with access to money and media.

The Desertization of Kuwait

The experience of Kuwait provides a classic case in point of how the
Islamic banks changed the Middle East.

There is a distinctive pattern to the political evolution of Islamic
banking. One or more Islamic banks establish a beachhead in a par¬
ticular capital. The bank serves as an economic headquarters for
Muslim Brotherhood businessmen and other Islamist activists. The
bank builds a base of devout followers, while establishing lucrative
alliances with politicians, both religious and secular. Islamist organi¬
zations then draw strength from the bank’s economic power, and
Islamist institutions—including mosques, charities, and businesses—
prosper as a result. And a new class of wealthy Islamists emerges to
help finance the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist political fronts.

Unlike Saudi Arabia, which is strongly influenced by the Wahhabi
sect, the tiny, wealthy statelet of Kuwait is traditionally more liberal
and freewheeling. But in the 1970s, the Kuwaiti royal family, the
Islamic right, and Islamic banking groups joined hands to do battle
with a rising nationalist movement. As a result, the Persian Gulf emi¬
rate was fundamentally transformed. The centerpiece of the effort
was an Islamic bank called the Kuwait Finance House.

Kuwait was never especially a haven for the devout. The Wahhabi
militancy that seized Arabia for the Saudis and had influence in Qatar
and parts of the United Arab Emirates never found a foothold there. Its
playboy-dominated royal family, maintained in power by force of
British arms, seemed mostly content with its lot. Yet it was a shaky, arti¬
ficial nation, carved out of Iraq’s southern provinces and the Ottoman
Empire, created strictly as a British outpost in the Gulf that doubled as
an oil field for British Petroleum and Gulf Oil. A series of Iraqi govern¬
ments laid claim to it, and its fragile existence was preserved against
Iraqi irredentism at least twice, by British forces in 1961—when it first

84 • Devil’s Game

achieved independence—and by an American-led coalition in 1991.
Even after 1961, Kuwait was dependent on British civil servants, army
officers, and Anglo-American oil experts, and the arrangement was sat¬
isfying to both sides: the Anglo-Americans would have exclusive access
to Kuwait’s oil, and its royal family would gratefully accept their pro¬
tection and a healthy cut of the proceeds. Still, it was a largely secular
society, and in the Gulf, Kuwait was known for its relatively liberal tra¬
dition, with an on-again, off-again parliament, a mostly free media,
and a modestly flourishing political debate. Because the tiny population
of Kuwait preferred not to work if they didn’t have to, Kuwait
imported hundreds of thousands of workers from the Arab world and
Asia, especially Palestinians. And that was the rub.

“Kuwait was a listening post for Arab nationalism,” says Talcott
Seelye, who was a U.S. foreign service officer in Kuwait in the late 1950s.
“Nasserism, secular Nasserism, was the predominant political force
then, and it overshadowed Islam.” The revolution in Iraq in 1958, led by
communists and nationalists, found widespread sympathy in Kuwait,
even among a minority in the royal family, the A 1 Sabah. “I remember
sitting with Sheikh Jabr al-Sabah, who is now the ruler,” recalls Seelye.
“I mentioned the king of Iraq, he went like this”—drawing his finger
across throat—“to indicate, ‘He has to go.’ ” Seelye says that even then, a
lot of Palestinians had gathered in Kuwait. “It was very much a secular
society,” he says. “But the British were in control.” 38

During the 1960s, Kuwait’s government, though it wouldn’t be
mistaken for a Greek city-state, was among the least authoritarian in
the Middle East. Palestinians, who made up a great part of Kuwait’s
working and professional classes, along with students, were an
important force. The Islamists, represented by the Muslim Brother¬
hood, had only marginal lkipact then. “I used to attend the National
Assembly in those days,” says a former CIA official who served in
Kuwait, “and I was always amused by listening to the conservative
Islamists, who were always criticizing the Sabahs.” Yet they were not
a significant factor, nor were they organized. “There was always the
Muslim Brotherhood, coming out of Egypt,” says the CIA veteran.
“But I never thought that the Islamic side was significant.” 39

The Rise of Economic Islam • 185

Many of the most progressive Palestinians in Kuwait had emerged
from the ranks of the Arab Nationalist Movement, founded in the
1940s by George Habash, who would later create the Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The ANM, which was liberal
and secular, received some backing from Nasser and from the Arab
Baath Socialist Party, and it built a significant following among Pales¬
tinians in Beirut, Amman, and Kuwait. “In 1968, when the PFLP was
formed, they were all ANM,” says another CIA official, who often
dealt with Palestinian leaders. “I talked to a lot of the ANM people
back then.” 40 The ANM was only one expression of Arab national¬
ism and pan-Arabism, which began to gain adherents in Kuwait dur¬
ing the 1950s and 1960s, first among expatriate Arabs working in
Kuwait, then spreading to privileged Kuwaiti nationals, and even
gaining support among some members of the oligarchic Kuwaiti rul¬
ing family. By the mid-1970s, the strength of Arab nationalists in
Kuwait alarmed the dominant branch of the A 1 Sabah clan, and like
Sadat in Egypt, they reached out to the Islamists.

For the story of how an Islamic bank helped change Kuwait, we
are indebted to Kristin Smith, author of a brilliant and instructive case
study of how right-wing Islamist money and a threatened oligarchy
joined forces. 41 “The Kuwaiti government, alarmed over the volatile
mix of the opposition’s rhetoric and the large Palestinian expatriate
community working in Kuwait, dissolved the parliament [in 1976] for
the first time since liberation and began casting about for new allies to
counter the Arab nationalists,” wrote Smith. “It found them in the
Islamic forces.” 42

In reaching out to the Islamists, the Kuwaitis had Jordan in mind,
where the Muslim Brotherhood had helped King Hussein crush a Pales¬
tinian insurgency. That small state, whose monarch was descended
from the Hashemite dynasty installed in Amman by T. E. Lawrence,
Churchill, and the British Arab Bureau, hosted a huge population of
Palestinian refugees. After years of tension, a civil war erupted there in
1970. In a massacre remembered as “Black September,” King Hussein
mobilized Jordan’s Bedouin military to defeat the Palestinian uprising.
The Muslim Brotherhood of Jordan, which had long supported the

86 • Devil’s Game

Jordanian monarchy, threw its weight into the battle against the
Palestine Liberation Organization in support of the king. So, the
Kuwaiti rulers must have reasoned, the Islamic right might also pro¬
vide important leverage against the Arab and Palestinian nationalists
in the Gulf sheikhdom.

At the time virtually no Kuwaiti women wore veils. In mosques,
mostly the elderly prayed. In Kuwaiti universities, men and women
attended classes together. Most Kuwaitis believed that religion was
important in private life and in cultural activities, but not in politics.
Political Islam in Kuwait had only a tenuous foothold, although the
small Muslim Brotherhood was efficiently organized through the
Social Reform Society, which had been formed in 1962.

But beginning in the mid-1970s, the A 1 Sabah and Islamists joined
hands. As the political pressure mounted from nationalists, PLO sup¬
porters, and restive Kuwaitis excluded from power by the royal fam¬
ily, the Al Sabah clamped down, eliminating the noisy legislature. The
dissolution of the parliament by the ruler was applauded by the Mus¬
lim Brotherhood and the Social Reform Society, whose chairman was
brought into the government as minister of religious endowments.
That minister, in turn, encouraged and helped create an interest-free
banking institution, the Kuwait Finance House (KFH) in 1977. Based
on discredited theories that the Koran prohibits interest on loans, a
thesis that modern Islamic scholars ridicule, Islamists in Kuwait—
backed by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt—had been lobbying for
the establishment of such a bank since the early 1970s. Almost
overnight, KFH grew into Kuwait’s second largest bank, under the
patronage of the Al Sabah.

KFH was established with a 49 percent government share in the
capital, and it has enjoyed perks not afforded other banks, most
significantly freedom from Central Bank regulation and protected
monopoly status as Kuwait’s only Islamic bank... . KFH is a con¬
crete expression of the de facto alliance between the ruling family
and the Islamic movement.. . . Islamic finance in Kuwait, then,
embodies the growing Islamization of public life in Kuwait under
the benign gaze of the Kuwaiti government. 43

The Rise of Economic Islam • 187

KFH had another effect, too. It bypassed Kuwait’s merchant elite, the
private traders who resented the A 1 Sabah’s dominance of the mini¬
nation. Many in the merchant class had gravitated toward the Arab
nationalists in opposition to the A 1 Sabah. But they were barred from
involvement in KFH; instead, the Kuwaiti government mobilized the
desert-based Bedouins against the merchants. The tribal Bedouins
were the force that King Hussein used against the PLO, and they pro¬
vided the core of the most reactionary forces in Saudi Arabia.

A leading Kuwaiti professor, Shafeeq N. Ghabra, called the rising
influence of the Bedouin in Kuwait “desertization”:

The marriage between Bedouin conservative values and the
[Islamic] movement matured. .. . The majority of the relatively
deprived Bedouin tribes have moved from the sidelines to the fore¬
front in demanding societal recognition and equality, the basis for
which is found in Islam. Several influential populist Islamists have
risen from their ranks. . . . This process of “desertization,” as the
Bahraini thinker Muhammad Ansari labels it, is among the most
destructive processes in the Middle East. It undermines modern
society by bringing into urban society the ultraconservative values
of the desert and mixing them with Islamic populism. 44

The A 1 Sabah were prepared to risk everything to encourage
Islamism against the left. It worked. When the A 1 Sabah decided it
was safe to restore parliament, Islamists quickly took advantage, win¬
ning two seats in 1981 and steadily gaining after that. Wrote Ghabra,
“In the elections [of 1981], the secular pan-Arabist forces were
defeated by the Islamists, who became the only organized political
group in Parliament.” 45 None of this, of course, was the result of
some native, legitimate Islamist upsurge; rather, it was the direct
result of a conscious decision taken by the Kuwaiti rulers, and it was
backed by the Kuwait Finance House.

The deep pockets of KFH bankrolled the growth of the Islamists in
Kuwait from 1977 forward. It was widely reported in Kuwait that
KFH “repays Islamist politicians in kind, putting its considerable
resources behind their election campaigns.” KFH, Kristin Smith

88 • Devil’s Game

wrote, used “money, real estate, jobs ... to influence elections.” 46 Its
real estate was reportedly used for rallies and demonstrations, and its
huge workforce enlisted in Islamist campaigns. KFH also became
home to more than a hundred Islamic charities, usually tied to
Islamist groups. Some of the KFH-based money was diverted to sup¬
port radical Islamist groups in Egypt, Afghanistan, and Algeria.
Islamist cash from KFH also directly supported Kuwaiti charities and
social groups run by Islamists, and at least one of the KFH-linked
charities was reportedly tied to A 1 Qaeda. 47 Inside the bank, KFH
imposed strict segregation of the sexes, and outside it created “Islami-
cally run” buildings, shopping malls, and schools organized accord¬
ing to ultraconservative principles. Its tentacles were everywhere:

KFH has been especially interested in education, sponsoring field
trips to KFH, scholarships encouraging students to study Islamic
economics, Islamic competitions (Koranic memorization and the
like), and the establishment of private Islamic schools. . . . KFH
reaches out to society at large through its monthly magazine, Al
Noor, which has a circulation of over io,ooo. 48

The presence of the KFH, which became a $i billion institution,
accelerated the spread of right-wing Islamism in previously secular
Kuwait. The teachers’ association and the ministry of education were
taken over by Islamists, and curricula were changed to reflect the new
religiosity. The ministry of information also fell under the influence of
Islamists, and television broadcasts became more conservative and
subject to censorship. Books, too, were censored, while pamphlets
and audiotapes reflecting Islamist views and revivalist-style preachers
flooded the country. 49

The desertization of Kuwait is just one example of how the mon¬
eyed power of the new Islamic right extended the movement’s influ¬
ence. But what appeared businesslike on the surface—to the CIA and
even to many rulers in the Middle East—had a dark side, in the sur¬
reptitious growth of an Islamist underground whose wrath was
directed not solely against the left and the nationalists but against the
United States, the West, and its Arab and Middle Eastern allies. The

The Rise of Economic Islam ■ 189

institutions of economic Islam—banks, finance houses, and charities
established by the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies in the Gulf—
quietly helped to spawn this new generation of Islamists, including
the forerunners of Al Qaeda.

Yet the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan continued blithely
to make use of the Islamic right in their foreign policy calculations,
and other countries joined in. In the late 1970s, as the United States
laid the groundwork for the jihad against the USSR in Afghanistan,
two key U.S. allies, Israel and Jordan, launched a mini-jihad of their
own, mobilizing the Islamic right against Syria and the Palestine Lib¬
eration Organization.

ISRAEL’S ISLAMISTS

America’s position in the Middle East never seemed more
secure than during the late 1970s. Only a handful of so-called
rejectionist states—Iraq, Syria, Libya, and the Palestine Liberation
Organization—stood outside America’s nascent empire. And the
United States was on the offensive. Along with its allies, including
Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf monarchies, Washington sought to
weaken and isolate the remaining rejectionists, minimizing their role
in the region and even seeking regime changes, using a combination of
threats, persuasion, and bribes. Two members of the anti-U.S. bloc,
Syria and the PLO, found themselves facing simultaneous civil wars
against forces led by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic right.
In turn, the Muslim Brotherhood was supported by two U.S. allies,
Israel and Jordan. And the United States tacitly backed its allies in
promoting Islamist unrest against Damascus and the PLO’s Yasser
Arafat.

The Israeli-Jordanian effort in support of the Muslim Brotherhood
took off in the late 1970s, and it continued well into the 1980s. Dur¬
ing that time, the Islamic right would begin to exhibit the radical and
anti-American characteristics that would later mark its Osama bin

Israel’s Islamists • 191

Laden-linked terrorist phase. A hostile Islamist takeover in Iran, a
major Islamist revolt in Saudi Arabia, and the murder of Sadat by
Muslim Brotherhood-linked terrorists all erupted in 1979-81. But
before, during, and after these events, Amman and Jerusalem would
continue their reckless policy in support of Brotherhood-allied groups
in Syria and Palestine. Although there is no evidence that the United
States was directly involved in the Israeli-Jordanian efforts, according
to U.S. officials who served in the Middle East during this period, the
CIA reported on these developments and U.S. officials were aware of
what Israel and Jordan were doing. At no time did the United States
dissuade them.

It might seem surprising that a Jewish state and a secular Arab
monarchy would join forces with Islamic fundamentalism. But both
in Amman and in Jerusalem, the Muslim Brotherhood was seen, cyni¬
cally, as a weapon against Syria and the PLO. In Syria, the Brothers
carried out systematic attacks, terrorism, and uprisings in a civil war
that left thousands dead. And beginning in 1967 through the late
1980s, Israel helped the Muslim Brotherhood establish itself in the
occupied territories. It assisted Ahmed Yassin, the leader of the Broth¬
erhood, in creating Hamas, betting that its Islamist character would
weaken the PLO. It did, though it backfired in a way that the Israeli
supporters of Hamas didn’t count on, evolving into a terrorist group
that in the 1990s carried out suicide bombings that killed hundreds of
Israeli Jews. Together, Israel and Jordan unleashed a monster.

Israel’s Trained Zeal

“Israel started Hamas,” says Charles Freeman, the veteran U.S. diplo¬
mat and former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “It was a project of
Shin Bet [the Israeli domestic intelligence agency], which had a feeling
that they could use it to hem in the PLO.” 1

In Arabic, Hamas—an acronym for the Islamic Resistance
Movement—means “zeal.” Though it was formally established in 1987 ,
the founders of Hamas were all members of the Muslim Brotherhood,

92- • Devil’s Game

especially in the Gaza Strip. In the wake of the 1967 war, and Israel’s
occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, the Islamists flourished with
support from both Israel and Jordan. Officially, the Brotherhood in
the occupied territories fell under the supervision of the Muslim
Brotherhood of Jordan, and Hamas was a wholly owned subsidiary
of the organization.

The roots of Hamas go back to the 1930s. Beginning with the
activities of the pro-Nazi (and pro-British) mufti of Jerusalem, Haj
Amin al-Husseini, Palestinian activism has all along had a minority
Islamist component. The mufti met Hassan al-Banna’s emissaries in
1935. A forerunner of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, the
Makarem Society of Jerusalem, was set up in 1943. 2 Many Palestin¬
ian nationalists who would go on to become leaders of the secular,
non-Islamist movement for a Palestinian state were attracted to the
Brotherhood at the time, as branches began to proliferate in Amman,
in the Syrian cities of Aleppo, Hama, and Damascus, and in Gaza,
Jerusalem, Ramallah, Haifa, and elsewhere. The Muslim Brother¬
hood’s first office in Jerusalem was opened in 1945 by Said Ramadan,
and by 1947 there were twenty-five Muslim Brotherhood branches in
Palestine with as many as 25,000 members. 3 In October 1946, and
again in 1947, the Muslim Brotherhood held a regional convention in
Haifa, with delegates from Lebanon and Transjordan, calling for the
“spread of Muslim Brotherhood chapters throughout Palestine.” 4

In the early days, the movement was bifurcated. In Gaza, the Mus¬
lim Brotherhood was affiliated with the organization’s headquarters
branch in Cairo. On the West Bank, the area of Palestine that came
under Jordanian administration after 1948, the Brotherhood was
attached to the Jordanian branch. In 1950, the West Bank and Jor¬
danian branches of the Muslim Brotherhood united to form the Mus¬
lim Brotherhood of Jordan. It was a docile, conservative group that
developed increasingly close ties to the monarchy, and which was
scorned by nationalists. 5 The Hashemites, in turn, encouraged the
activities of the Brotherhood, seeing it as a force to counterbalance
communist, leftist, and, later, Nasserist and Baathist sentiments. The
founder and organizational leader of the Brotherhood in Jordan was
Abu Qurah, a wealthy merchant with no interest in upsetting any

Israel’s Islamists • 193

apple carts. Qurah had close ties to Syrian businessmen in Amman
and to Banna and Ramadan in Egypt. King Abdullah “granted the
Brotherhood legal status as a welfare organization, hoping to secure
its support against the secular opposition.” 6 The king regarded the
Brothers with some suspicion, but he hoped that by coopting them he
could enhance his legitimacy as an Islamic leader. His father, T. E.
Lawrence’s Sharif Hussein of Mecca, maintained a well-publicized
but spurious claim to be a direct descendant of the Prophet
Mohammed, and although the aura was dimming, Abdullah and his
grandson, the future King Hussein, would do what they could to keep
it alive.

The Brotherhood, like the Islamic right everywhere, was strongly
anti-communist, arguing “that in the twentieth century Egypt and the
rest of the Islamic world were threatened by the onslaught of commu¬
nist and nationalist ideologies which denied the supremacy of
sharia .” 7 The Muslim Brotherhood was a loyal force in support of
King Hussein, and bitterly opposed to pan-Arabism. Its social base in
Jordan was rooted in the wealthy, East Bank landowning families who
saw socialism and land reform as existential threats. When Jordan’s
left-leaning prime minister Suleiman al-Nabulsi, who was influenced
by Nasser, challenged the monarchy in a showdown in 1957 that came
close to toppling it, the Brotherhood sided with the king and saved his
throne. “From this point on,” wrote Boulby, “there existed an unwrit¬
ten understanding of coexistence between King Hussein and the Broth¬
erhood.” 8 Yusaf al-Azm, a leader of the Brothers in Jordan, said: “We
agreed with the king because Nasser was irrational in his attacks
against him, [and] to protect ourselves, because if Nasser’s followers
had risen to power in Jordan, the Muslim Brotherhood would have
been liquidated, as they were in Egypt.” 9 The Brotherhood’s support
for the king came at a critical moment. Nasser and his allies were
ascendant, the king of Iraq (a fellow Hashemite) was overthrown, and
U.S. policy had shifted decisively against Egypt. In 1958, U.S. troops
were sent to Lebanon and the British army to Jordan and Kuwait, to
halt the nationalist upsurge, and the Brotherhood joined in. While
communist, Baathist, and Nasserist parties were suppressed by the
king, the Muslim Brotherhood was encouraged to run candidates in

94 ' Devil’s Game

elections for Jordan’s sham parliament, winning seats in Hebron,
Nablus, and other West Bank cities. The Jordanian army also provided
military training to Brotherhood paramilitary forces. 10

In Gaza, later a stronghold of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood
took root among Palestinian students coming from Cairo and
Kuwait. The Brothers created the League of Palestinian Students,
many of whose leaders would later abandon the Islamists and form
the core of the PLO, including Yasser Arafat, Salah Khalaf, and the
Hassan brothers. 11 In Gaza, then under Egyptian administration, the
Brotherhood found itself feeling the heat when President Nasser of
Egypt crushed the organization in Cairo. In July 1957, Khalil al-
Wazir, a future PLO leader, wrote a paper proposing that “the Pales¬
tinian Brotherhood establish a special organization alongside their
own which has no visible Islamic coloration or agenda but which has
the stated goal of liberating Palestine.” From this moment on, the
Palestinian movement was divided. On one side were the nationalists,
those who agreed with Wazir, who went on to form the Palestine
National Liberation Movement, or Fatah, in 1958-59. On the other
side were the Islamists, those who preferred to remain loyal to the
Muslim Brotherhood, who did not join Fatah and, in 1960 , explicitly
opposed the new organization. 12

Fatah—which began guerrilla attacks against Israel in 1965—
would embody Palestinian nationalism and ally itself, sometimes
uncomfortably, with Nasser’s vision of Arab nationalism. The Broth¬
erhood, on the other hand, remained in the camp of the Arab conser¬
vatives, allied to the Jordanian king, and supported by Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait, and the soon-to-be-independent Gulf sheikhdoms. The
Brotherhood’s membership among Palestinians, which had reached
many thousands in the 1940s, declined sharply as Arab nationalism
became the rallying cry in the Middle East. Pro-Nasser parties, the
Baath, communists, and Fatah all gained. The Muslim Brotherhood
had a membership of less than a thousand on the West Bank, and a
thousand in Gaza, before the 1967 war with Israel. In the West Bank,
the Brotherhood was tolerated by the Jordanian authorities, while in
Gaza it was repressed by Nasser’s Egypt.

It is during this period that Ahmed Yassin first emerged as the fun-

Israel’s Islamists • 195

damentalist firebrand who would win Israeli backing in the 1970s
and 1980s and who would found Hamas in 1987. 13 In 1965, Yassin
was arrested by Egyptian intelligence in one of Nasser’s crackdowns.
After 1967, with Israel in control of the West Bank and Gaza, things
changed. Yassin was freed. According to Shaul Mishal and Avraham
Sela, Israeli scholars who wrote The Palestinian Hamas:

Israel was more permissive regarding social and cultural Islamic
activity, and the very fact that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip
were under one government enabled a renewed encounter
between Islamic activists of both regions. This in turn paved the
way for the development of joint organizational endeavors. ... In
the late 1960s, a joint organization of Islamic activity for the Gaza
Strip and the West Bank—the United Palestinian [Muslim] Broth¬
erhood Organization—was founded. . . . The 1970s witnessed
growing links between the Muslim Brotherhood in the Israeli-
occupied territories and Israel’s Arab citizens. Thus leading Mus¬
lim Brotherhood figures from the West Bank and Gaza, like
Sheikh Yassin, visited Israeli Muslim communities from the
Galilee to the Negev to preach and lead Friday prayers. 14

Soon Israel would begin to see Yassin, and the Muslim Brotherhood,
as valuable allies against the PLO. In 1967 the Muslim Brotherhood
began to create its infrastructure, under the tolerant eye of the now
all-powerful Israeli authorities. Charity organizations proliferated.
The religious endowments (waqfs) grew richer, controlling 10 percent
of all the real estate in Gaza, hundreds of businesses, and thousands
of acres of agricultural land. And, like Egypt, Sudan, and other coun¬
tries after 1967, the Palestinians were being Islamized. From 1967 to
1987 the numbers of mosques in Gaza grew from 200 to 600, and on
the West Bank, from 400 to 750. 15

In 1970, the PLO was expelled from Jordan after being defeated in
the civil war that erupted in September. The Muslim Brotherhood in
Jordan supported the king and his Bedouin army against the PLO,
and Israel helped King Hussein, threatening action if the Syrian army
moved to help the PLO. That same year, Ahmed Yassin, leader of the
Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, asked the Israeli military administration

?6 • Devil’s Game

for permission to establish an organization. His appeal was rejected,
but three years later, under the watchful eye of the Shin Bet, Yassin
founded the Islamic Center, an Islamist group that was only thinly dis¬
guised as a religious institution. Yassin began to establish effective
control over hundreds of mosques. Many of these mosques, along
with charities and schools, served as recruiting vehicles and political
organizing centers for Islamists. In 1976, Yassin’s Islamic Center spun
off the Islamic Association, a membership group with branches
throughout the Gaza Strip, and the movement grew.

Israel’s formal support for the Islamists occurred after 1977, when
Menachem Begin’s Herut Party and the Likud bloc stunned the Israeli
Labor Party in national elections. In 1978, Begin’s new government
formally licensed Ahmed Yassin’s Islamic Association. It was part of a
full-court press against the PLO. Civil war was raging in Lebanon,
where Israeli-backed Maronite Christian militias were battling the
Palestinians. In the West Bank and Gaza, Begin tried to undermine the
PLO’s powerful influence in two ways: by fostering the Islamist move¬
ment, and by the creation of so-called Village Leagues, local councils
run by anti-PLO Palestinians who were carefully vetted by the Israeli
military authorities. Yassin and the Brotherhood won significant
influence over the Village Leagues. Up to 200 members of the Leagues
were given paramilitary training by Israel, and Shin Bet recruited
many paid informers through the network. 16 The leagues themselves,
run by quislings, were destined to fail, scorned and ridiculed by Pales¬
tinians in the occupied territories. But the Brotherhood would con¬
tinue to gain, at the expense of both Fatah and the more left-wing
Palestinian groups, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine.

David Shipler, a former reporter for the New York Times, cites the
Israeli military governor of Gaza as boasting that Israel expressly
financed the Islamists against the PLO:

Politically speaking, Islamic fundamentalists were sometimes
regarded as useful to Israel, because they had conflicts with the sec¬
ular supporters of the PLO. Violence between the two groups
erupted occasionally on West Bank university campuses, and the

Israel’s Islamists • 197

Israeli military governor of the Gaza Strip, Brigadier General
Yitzhak Segev, once told me how he had financed the Islamic move¬
ment as a counterweight to the PLO and the Communists. “The
Israeli Government gave me a budget and the military government
gives to the mosques,” he said. In 1980, when fundamentalist
protestors set fire to the office of the Red Crescent Society in Gaza,
headed by Dr. Haider Abdel-Shafi, a Communist and PLO sup¬
porter, the Israeli army did nothing, intervening only when the mob
marched to his home and seemed to threaten him personally. 17

Israel was not the only supporter of Yassin and the Muslim Brother¬
hood. Religious elements in Saudi Arabia, too, wanted to undermine the
secular PLO, and wealthy Saudi business leaders helped finance Yassin,
although his ability to operate in Gaza depended on the goodwill of the
Israeli authorities. Yassin’s “ties with the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan
were instrumental in enabling them to forge close relations with Islamic
institutions in Saudi Arabia, which in the 1970s and 1980s provided
generous financial aid to Islamic associations.” 18 Still, the government of
Saudi Arabia remained suspicious of Yassin, and eventually it would
seek to halt even private Saudi aid to the Yassin-led movement. Perhaps
to curry favor with conservative Saudi Islamists and Wahhabi-
influenced members of the royal family, the Brotherhood attacked the
PLO for its irreligious outlook. The Brotherhood said that the PLO
“does not serve God,” and Yassin declared: “The PLO is secularist. It
cannot be accepted as a representative unless it becomes Islamic.” 19

At the time, it seemed unlikely that the Muslim Brotherhood
would gain much of a foothold among Palestinians. First of all, many
Palestinians were Christian, and would have no truck with an organi¬
zation pledged to create an Islamic state. Palestinians were also
among the Arab world’s most modern, educated, and Westernized
populations, and as a diaspora they were well traveled and well con¬
nected throughout the Arab world, the United States, and Europe, not
to mention the USSR. Above all, they were nationalists. On the other
hand, the very nature of the Palestinian Islamists was to oppose
nationalism, and to oppose the creation of a state of Palestine, instead
focusing on the necessity of first Islamizing Palestine and the Arab
world. But among Palestinians the appeal of Islamism grew as Israel’s

98 • Devil’s Game

relentless repression of the PLO caused people in the West Bank and
Gaza to look for alternatives.

U.S. diplomats and CIA officials were aware that Israel was foster¬
ing Islamism in the occupied territories. “We saw Israel cultivate
Islam as a counterweight to Palestinian nationalism,” says Martha
Kessler, a senior analyst for the CIA who early on was alert to the
importance of the Islamist movement and the threat it could pose to
U.S. interests in the region. 20 But neither the CIA nor the State
Department tried to stop it. Throughout the foreign service and the
national security bureaucracy in Washington, there was division as to
the significance of Palestinian Islamism. Some saw it as benign or use¬
ful, some as possibly harmful, and some simply believed it wouldn’t
catch on, that Islamism wouldn’t attract a following among Palestini¬
ans. Says Kessler:

Radical Islam and extremism didn’t come into play as much with
the Palestinians as elsewhere, at least early on. Many among the
Palestinian diaspora were educated, sophisticated, and secular.
Their move toward Islamic radicalism didn’t take place until later.

The Israelis encouraged it quite a bit. Although they weren’t
responsible for it completely, they didn’t crack down on it. They
allowed them to flourish. Where they could fiddle around with
events to elevate Islamists to the detriment of Fatah, they would.
They’d treat religious figures with deference. 21

“I thought they were playing with fire,” says David Long, a former
Middle East expert at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence
and Research. “I didn’t realize they’d end up creating a monster. But I
don’t think you ought to mess around with potential fanatics.” 22
Meanwhile, in Syria, Israel and Jordan were doing just that.

Target: Damascus

In the 19 70s, Israel and Jordan were technically at war with each
other, but they had a complex and cooperative relationship behind the

Israel’s Islamists • 199

scenes. King Hussein was on the CIA payroll, and Israel’s and Jor¬
dan’s intelligence services had a relationship that, while it couldn’t be
characterized as warm, was at least professionally correct. “There is a
long tradition of complex covert relations between the Hashemites
and the Zionists, over many years,” according to Philip Wilcox, an
experienced U.S. foreign service officer. 23 Israel and Jordan also had a
common enemy: Syria.

The Syrian ruler, Hafez Assad, was vulnerable on Islamic grounds.
He was, of course, a secular leader and a Baathist. But Assad was also
a member of a religious minority in Syria, the Alawites, a quasi-Shiite
sect that was viewed with disdain by the ultra-orthodox Muslim
Brotherhood and which was considered un-Islamic by Wahhabi cler¬
ics. Perhaps more than in other Arab countries, the Muslim Brother¬
hood in Syria was highly factionalized, with kaleidoscopically shifting
power centers both in Syrian Sunni strongholds such as Aleppo,
Homs, and Hama and among Muslim Brotherhood leaders in exile in
Germany, Switzerland, and London.

The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood was also an early offshoot of
Hassan al-Banna’s movement in Egypt. The Brotherhood in Syria
drew its members from the ranks of Syrian students returning from A 1
Azhar in Cairo in the mid-1950s, and it formed branches in Syria’s
major cities under the name Shabab Muhammed (Young Men of
Muhammed). Aleppo, in northern Syria, served as the headquarters
of the Muslim Brotherhood beginning in 1935- 24 In 1944, its head¬
quarters moved to Damascus, and it was led by Mustafa Sibai, a grad¬
uate of A 1 Azhar and friend of Hassan al-Banna. In the 1950s, as
Nasser cracked down on the movement, a significant number of
Brotherhood members took refuge in Syria. But as Syria moved into
the nationalist camp, first joining Nasser as part of the United Arab
Republic and then under the Baath in the 1960s, the Muslim Brother¬
hood found Syria less hospitable. In 1964, the Brothers led anti-Baath
riots in Syria, under the slogan “Islam or Baath.” In 1967, during and
after Syria’s defeat in the war with Israel, the Brotherhood’s most mil¬
itant faction declared a jihad against the Syrian government. Their
animosity only intensified after 1973, when Assad proclaimed a new

zoo • Devil’s Game

secular constitution for Syria that described the country as a “demo¬
cratic, popular, socialist state.” Violent Islamist demonstrations fol¬
lowed. 25

In the mid-1970s, as Lebanon’s agonizing civil war began, draw¬
ing in Israel and Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood launched an all-out
assault against the government of Syria.

Beginning in 1976, the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria carried out
assassinations, bomb attacks, and other violent actions in numerous
cities, including Damascus. Next door, in Lebanon, Syria was engaged
in a proxy war with Israel in the midst of Lebanon’s civil war, and the
Brothers proved to be a formidable anti-Assad force. Accusing the
Syrian regime of being run by “false Muslims,” the Brotherhood
declared jihad, its campaign led by Adnan Saad al-Din, a former
member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The Combat Van¬
guard of Fighters, an underground paramilitary arm, assassinated
Baath officials and prominent Alawites, security agents, and inform¬
ers, along with Soviet military advisers in Syria. Gradually the crisis
escalated into violent demonstrations and strikes, and then to major
terrorist attacks. In June 1979, a gang of Brotherhood terrorists
attacked a Syrian military school in Aleppo, killing eighty-three
cadets by locking them into a building and attacking it with auto¬
matic weapons and firebombs. The following year, the Muslim Broth¬
erhood attempted to assassinate Assad, and the government retaliated
in an unrestrained counterattack. In October 1980, the so-called
Islamic Front of Syria was established, uniting the Islamic Liberation
Party, both factions of the Muslim Brotherhood, and other funda¬
mentalist groups. Fighting intensified in 1981, and in November a
massive car bomb in Damascus killed two hundred people. 26

To carry out such sophisticated operations against a state known for
its security apparatus, the Muslim Brotherhood depended on support
from both Jordan and Israel. The two nations did not try very hard to
keep their support secret, establishing training camps for Muslim Broth¬
erhood fighters in Lebanon and in northern Jordan, near the Syrian bor¬
der. Israel funneled support for the Muslim Brotherhood through
Lebanon, part of which went to the Free Lebanon Forces, a private army
of mostly Christian, but partly Shiite, militiamen in southern Lebanon

Israel’s Islamists • 201

run by a charismatic rebel military officer, Major Saad Haddad. In
1978, in the midst of the Lebanese civil war, Israel sent 20,000 troops
into Lebanon, and in withdrawing, left part of Lebanon under the con¬
trol of Major Haddad’s FLF, which remained allied with Israel until the
mid-1980s. In a series of communiques in the early 1980s, Haddad
boasted of training the Muslim Brotherhood. For example:

Yesterday the Free Lebanon commander, Maj. Sa’d Haddad,
opened the seventh training camp for the Muslim Brotherhood
somewhere in Free Lebanon. About 200 persons, most of them
Syrians and including some Lebanese, are attending this course. In
a speech, Maj. Haddad urged the trainees to train on commando
operations so that they and their colleagues liberate Syria from the
factional Alawi regime. . .. The Major said: “The training you
will receive, which is of high standards and includes the art of sur¬
prising the enemy, is not available anywhere else in the region or
even in the whole world.” 27

Actually, the training that the Israeli-backed Haddad provided the
Brotherhood was available in at least two other places at that exact
moment: northern Jordan, and the Maronite Christian enclave in
Lebanon, where the Phalangists, a fascist-like militia run by the pro-
Nazi Gemayel clan and supported by Israel, ran Brotherhood camps
for war in Syria.

The camps in Jordan operated more or less openly. In 1981, Syria’s
foreign minister denounced King Hussein: “The king’s policy has
driven him to transform Jordan into a base for the gang of murder
and crime, the Muslim Brotherhood, in order to exert pressure on and
confuse Syria.” 28 Two weeks later, Assad delivered a lengthy speech in
which he bitterly criticized Jordan for supporting the Muslim Broth¬
erhood insurrection in Syria:

Problems created by the Muslim Brotherhood [have begun] to
emerge increasingly in Syria. Of course, the Muslim Brotherhood
is an essential historical link in the chain of reactionary-imperialist
relations in the region.... It was natural for the Jordanian regime
and the Muslim Brothers to exchange support.... It was natural

202 • Devil’s Game

for the Muslim Brotherhood gang to implement the orders and
for that gang to find all the necessary arms, training, and finan¬
cial facilities in the Jordanian arena. ... We arrested criminals
belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood gang in Syria and at the
Jordanian-Syrian border who told us they had been in Jordan,
[where they received] sums of money, weapons, and forged iden¬
tity cards. 29

And a month later, Abdullah Omar, a leading Baath Party official in
Syria, said that Syria had evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood was
backed by Jordan and by the “Phalangist gangs in Lebanon, supported
by Israel and U.S. imperialism.” 30 After the explosion in Damascus in
1981 that killed hundreds, Syria accused the Muslim Brotherhood of
acting as “agents of Israel.” 31

All of Assad’s and Omar’s charges were true.

The scale of the attacks in Syria was barely reported in the United
States. A rare exception appeared in Newsweek. “Over the past five
years the Brotherhood has assassinated hundreds of Alawite members
of Assad’s ruling Baath Party, along with their relatives, Assad’s per¬
sonal doctor, and a number of Soviet advisers,” Newsweek reported.
“Assad has accused Jordan of providing shelter and training for Syr¬
ian Brothers.” 32 But for the most part, the Brotherhood terror cam¬
paign in Syria was invisible to Americans. Not so to U.S. intelligence,
however. “We knew about the Muslim Brotherhood there, a lot more
than what was in the papers,” says David Long. “I was the division
chief for Near East at INR [the Bureau of Intelligence and Research].
We looked benignly upon it. We knew it was risky, but life is risky.” 33

For Assad, the Muslim Brotherhood presented an existential threat.
Martha Kessler, the former CIA analyst, says that Israel and Jordan

. . . were playing with fire, and I don’t think they realized how
dangerous it would become. But for Assad it was critical. He spent
nearly five years trying to deal with the Muslim Brotherhood, to
accommodate them or co-opt them. In the end, he’d virtually lost
control of the northern third of the country. He was going down
at the time. He was really in trouble.” 34

Israel’s Islamists • 203

U.S. diplomats were aware of Jordanian support, at least, for the
Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, but claimed that the United States had
a hands-off policy. Talcott Seelye, the U.S. ambassador to Syria at the
time, says:

I was ambassador to Syria from 1978 to 1981 , and that’s when I
became aware of an underground movement in Syria, because
there was a campaign of bombing and assassinations of Baathist
officials. By 1979 we sensed the Islamic movement in Syria. In
1980 , while I was out of the country, someone got into Assad’s
office and threw a bomb, and killed one of Assad’s bodyguards
but missed him. The Soviets, who had a lot of people there, would
ride around in heavily protected vehicles.

Seelye says that Assad summoned him to complain about the Muslim
Brotherhood violence.

King Hussein had propitiated the [Muslim Brotherhood], which
had established camps in north Jordan. I went to see Assad, and he
told me: “I know the United States is behind this.” I said, “I’d like
to see the evidence. I can tell you 100 percent that we are not.”
Whether King Hussein was actively involved, I don’t know.

But Seelye adds: “I don’t think it bothered us too much that they were
causing problems for Assad.” 35

Actually, King Hussein was involved. Four years later, Jordan
admitted its role in support of the Muslim Brotherhood and apolo¬
gized to Syria. “It turns out that some who did have a connection with
the bloody events in Syria were present in our quarters,” wrote the
king, in a letter to Assad. 36 In what was called an “extraordinary
admission,” Hussein said that his country had permitted the Brother¬
hood to wage war on Syria from the kingdom but, in seeking a recon¬
ciliation with Assad, he now believed that the Muslim Brotherhood
were “outlaws committing crimes and sowing seeds of dissension
among people.” King Hussein’s prime minister visited Damascus, and
the king declared that he wanted to warn “against the evil designs of

2.04 ' Devil’s Game

this rotten group.” 37 A few days later, hundreds of anti-Syrian Mus¬
lim Brotherhood members were rounded up in Jordan. 38

Robert Baer, a CIA operations officer who worked in the Middle
East and India, has written about his encounters with the Muslim
Brotherhood, criticizing the agency for its willingness to play along
with the Brothers. “Syria,” wrote Baer, in Sleeping with the Devil,
“seemed to be the real problem.” That country was critical to the
prospects of Middle East peace and, officially, Washington wanted
Assad gone. “But,” wrote Baer, “if he were replaced by the Brothers,
you could count on things getting a lot worse.” Baer asked his boss,
Tom Twetten, about the Muslim Brotherhood:

He shrugged. “The Jordanians give them money and refuge, but
only because they hate the Syrians—my enemy’s enemy is my
friend sort of deal.” “What do the Jordanians say about them?” I
asked. “We don’t press the Jordanians for details. And they don’t
volunteer anything. The Muslim Brotherhood isn’t a target for
us.” What Twetten was telling me was that he had no instructions
to spy on the Muslim Brotherhood.... Since the Muslim Brother¬
hood wasn’t a target, [the CIA in] Amman wasn’t supposed to
waste money on them. 39

Did the United States support the Muslim Brotherhood directly?
According to Baer, the answer is highly classified. “People said there
were code-word files on this,” he says, meaning that only those who
were directly involved could access those ultra-secret reports. “I don’t
know. It was supported by Saudi Arabia, which was supported by us.
What happened was, you simply went to governments and said:
Here’s some money—do your dirty work. Or, we’d give them supplies
and equipment.”

According to Baer, the Muslim Brotherhood wasn’t getting sup¬
port only from Haddad, the Israeli-backed militiaman in southern
Lebanon. “It wasn’t just Major Haddad, it was the Lebanese Front,”
he says, meaning the right-wing Lebanese Christian bloc that had
close ties to Israel. “The Lebanese Front was protecting the Brother¬
hood in Beirut, in Christian East Beirut.” Baer says that the CIA failed
to take the organization seriously as a potential threat. “We missed

Israel’s Islamists • 205

the Muslim Brotherhood. It was seen as ‘their’ problem,” he says.
“Our approach to the Middle East was defined by the Cold War, and
if these guys were going after Assad, well, so what? We certainly
didn’t confront King Hussein on this.” 40 Nor did we confront or chal¬
lenge the Israelis.

Hama and Hamas

In different ways, Israeli and Jordanian support for the Muslim
Brotherhood came to a head in the 1980s.

In Syria, the final showdown between Assad’s government and the
Brotherhood took place in Hama, a Syrian city of 200,000 which had
always been a stronghold of Sunni fundamentalism. It began, recalls
former U.S. ambassador Seelye, with a rumor. “The events in Hama
started with a false report that Assad had been overthrown,” Seelye
says. Excited by the news, the Muslim Brotherhood went on a murder
spree in the city, slaughtering hundreds of soldiers and Syrian offi¬
cials. “The Islamists killed all of the Baathist officials in the city,” says
Seelye. 41 For Assad, it was an intolerable provocation. He assembled
his army special forces, under the command of his brother, Rifaat
Assad, a notoriously heavy-handed enforcer. Thousands of troops—
12,000, according to Amnesty International, with the Brotherhood
claiming there were upwards of 50,ooo 42 —entered Hama, ruthlessly
suppressing the insurrection and leaving many dead. Again, figures
vary. An early report in Time said that 1,000 were killed. Most
observers estimated that 5,000 people died. Israeli sources, and the
Muslim Brotherhood, both charged that the death toll passed 20,000.
Over time, the legend of Hama grew. It was used by Syria’s critics to
portray Assad as a ruthless, Stalin-like killer, a depiction that Assad
did little to discourage because it intimidated Muslim Brotherhood
troublemakers. Reported Time, weeks after the crisis, “There were no
signs last week that the trouble in Hama was spreading elsewhere.” 43

“That,” says Seelye, “was the end of the Islamic movement in
Syria.” 44

But in Israel’s occupied territories, the Brotherhood was still gaining

206 • Devil’s G

momentum. In the early 1980s Israel supported the Islamists on sev¬
eral fronts. It was, of course, supporting the Gaza and West Bank
Islamists that, in 1987, would found Hamas. It was, with Jordan,
backing the Muslim Brotherhood war against Syria. In Afghanistan,
Israel quietly supported the jihad against the USSR, backing the Mus¬
lim Brotherhood-linked fundamentalists who led the mujahideen.
And Israel backed Iran, the militant heart of the Islamist movement,
during its long war with Iraq.

Not everyone in Israel was happy with the policy of collaborating
with Islamists. From all accounts, it was primarily Israel’s far right—
Begin, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, and Defense Minister Ariel
Sharon—who pursued this policy most aggressively. The Labor Party
in Israel tended to see the PLO as a viable partner for negotiations on a
final settlement. But the Israeli right opposed a settlement on principle
and wanted to hold on to the occupied West Bank, citing biblical rea¬
sons for wanting control over Judea and Samaria, the ancient names
for that disputed real estate.

“The fact is that Israel’s policy was a mistake in the long run,” says
Patrick Lang, the former Middle East director for the Defense Intelli¬
gence Agency. Lang says that the not everyone in the Mossad, Israel’s
intelligence service, agreed that supporting Ahmed Yassin’s Muslim
Brotherhood was a good idea. Especially those in the Mossad who
were most knowledgeable about Arab and Islamic culture were
opposed. “The Arabists in Israeli security services didn’t like it. But
the Israeli leaders figured they would kill off the PLO terrorists, and
then they could deal with Hamas. They misunderstood the phenome¬
non. The Israelis, most of them, were secularists, too, and they
thought these religious terrorists were a flash in the pan. They were
trying to defeat Arab nationalism using Muslim zealots.” 45

Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad officer who left the agency and
became a strong critic, is the author of two books on the Israeli secret
service. 46 According to Ostrovsky, “right-wing elements in the Mos¬
sad” feared that the popularity of Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat
might force Israel to give up territories that it wanted to hold on to, so
they backed fundamentalist Egyptian groups “under false flags,” that
is, by disguising the fact that the aid was coming from Israel. 47 And

Israel’s Islamists • 207

Ostrovsky leveled charges that the Israeli right deliberately fostered
Islamic fundamentalism among Palestinians.

Supporting the radical elements of Muslim fundamentalism sat
well with Mossad’s general plan for the region. An Arab world
run by fundamentalists would not be a party to any negotiations
with the West, thus leaving Israel again as the only democratic,
rational country in the region. And if the Mossad could arrange
for Hamas ... to take over the Palestinian streets from the PLO,
then the picture would be complete. 48

During most of the 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza and
the West Bank did not support resistance to the Israeli occupation.
Most of its energy went into fighting the PLO, especially its more left-
wing factions, on university campuses. Yassin’s followers used clubs,
chains, and even guns in violent clashes with pro-PLO Palestinian
nationalists. The Islamic University in Gaza was the site of numerous
battles, with PLO supporters seeking to secularize the university and
the Muslim Brotherhood trying to preserve its Islamist character. In
one clash alone, on June 4, 1983, more than 200 students were
injured. Similar confrontations occurred at Birzeit University and
Najah University in the West Bank. 49 Fatah, the main component of
the PLO, tried to co-opt the Muslim Brotherhood, seeking to arrange a
workable compromise. The Muslim Brotherhood, however, demanded
nothing less than the complete Islamization of the PLO, including the
elimination of the PLO’s left wing. “The Muslim Brotherhood leader¬
ship urged Fatah to purge its ranks of Marxist elements, to be aware
of the futility of secularism, and to cooperate closely with the Islamic
groups.” 50

In 1983, there occurred a curious and still unexplained incident
which has led some of Ahmed Yassin’s critics to suspect that he had
secret ties to the Shin Bet. Early in the year, Yassin was arrested by
Israeli authorities after he “ordered members of [the Islamic Center]
to secretly gather firearms, which were then distributed among
selected operatives.” 51 Some of the weapons were stored in Yassin’s
own house, and he was jailed. At the time, Palestinian resistance to
Israel was far more subdued than during the two uprisings, or

io8 • Devil’s Game

intifadas, of later years, when armed Palestinian fighters were com¬
mon. In 1983, however, a collection of deadly weaponry would have
been seen as a very serious offense. Although Yassin was sentenced to
thirteen years in prison, he was released after only a year. Compound¬
ing PLO suspicions, Yassin claimed that the weapons were being
gathered not to attack Israeli forces but to combat other Palestinian
factions.

In 1986-87, Yassin founded Hamas. Even then, as the intifada
began to develop, there were reports that Israel was backing Hamas.
“There were persistent rumors that the Israeli secret service gave
covert support to Hamas, because they were seen as a rival to the
PLO,” says Philip Wilcox, a former U.S. ambassador and counterter¬
rorism expert, who headed the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem at the
time. “I have never seen an intelligence document to that effect, but I
wouldn’t be surprised if it were true.” Wilcox says that U.S. officials
in Jerusalem dealt “regularly and intensively” with Hamas in the late
1980s, calling it a “complex organization with different strains. . . .
There is a more moderate element, which we’ve always thought might
be amenable to negotiations, and then there are the fanatics and the
militants.” 52

Although Hamas won support from Kuwait and from some
wealthy Saudis, the Saudi government was suspicious of Hamas.
“Saudi Arabia didn’t want money going to an Israeli front organiza¬
tion,” says Charles Freeman, who was U.S. ambassador to Saudi Ara¬
bia. “So they pulled in Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh, and
made him the head of a committee to stop the collection of money in
the mosques that might go to Hamas.” Eventually, however, as
Hamas seemed to grow more independent of Israel, and as the
intifada gathered momentum, the committee stopped functioning
and Saudi Arabia began to look the other way. “Probably there are
members of the Saudi royal family who give money to Hamas,” says
Freeman. 53

Not everyone in the U.S. government was happy about the emer¬
gence of Hamas, particularly the Arabists and the more anti-Israel
centers of power in the Pentagon. The Defense Intelligence Agency,
alarmed at the strength of the Palestinian Islamists, began collecting

Israel’s Islamists • 209

data for an analysis of the phenomenon in the mid- to late 1980s. “For
us, at the beginning, the Palestinian Islamic movement was way below
the radar,” says Lang. “We tried to write an NIE [National Intelligence
Estimate] at the end of the 1980s, since nothing had been written. But
the friends of Israel in the Reagan administration stopped us.” 54

Even after the Palestinian uprising began in 1987, the PLO
accused Hamas and Ahmed Yassin of acting “with the direct support
of reactionary Arab regimes ... in collusion with the Israeli occupa¬
tion.” Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the PLO and president of the
Palestinian Authority, told an Italian newspaper: “Hamas is a crea¬
ture of Israel, which, at the time of Prime Minister Shamir, gave them
money and more than 700 institutions, among them schools, universi¬
ties, and mosques.” 55 Arafat told the paper that former Israeli prime
minister Yitzhak Rabin admitted Israeli support for Hamas to him, in
the presence of Egyptian president Husni Mubarak. Arafat said that
Rabin described it as a “fatal error.”

The establishment of Hamas roughly coincided with the start of
the first intifada (1987-93). It was the first major, coordinated Pales¬
tinian uprising in the occupied territories, and virtually all Palestinian
factions supported it, including Hamas and the PLO. The uprising,
which included both violent and nonviolent tactics, had several
important effects. It once again brought the Palestinian-Israeli conflict
to world attention, and it propelled moderate Israelis, such as Yitzhak
Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Ehud Barak, toward negotiations with the
PLO. The inauguration of the peace talks in Oslo, Norway, which
began the so-called Oslo process, raised the first realistic hope for an
Israeli-PLO settlement since 1967.

Hamas, which had previously used violence only against other
Palestinian groups, took up arms against Israel during the intifada,
leading to an Israeli crackdown. Many Hamas leaders were arrested,
including Yassin, in 1989. Despite the support of Hamas for the
intifada, however, the PLO and Hamas were engaged in a constant
tug-of-war. Whenever the PLO and the Israeli Labor Party moved
toward an accord, Hamas would unleash a violent wave of attacks to
disrupt the talks. “Undermining the peace process has always been
the real target of Hamas and has played into the political ambitions of

• Devil’s Game

Likud,” wrote one analyst. “Every time Israeli and Palestinian nego¬
tiators appeared ready to take a major step toward achieving peace,
an act of Hamas terrorism has scuttled the peace process and pushed
the two sides apart.” 56

Hamas sought to gain advantage over the PLO by promoting itself
as the most militant force. Reports Ray Hanania:

The more the Labor-Arafat peace process advanced, the more
Hamas turned to violence. When . . . PLO officials denounced the
murder of tourists in Egypt in February 1990 , Hamas countered
by sending vehicles with loudspeakers through the streets of major
Palestinian cities, praising the attacks and denouncing the PLO for
its criticism . 57

Besides Hamas, which joined other Islamist organizations such as
Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah (Party of God) in adopting a
rejectionist stance, the Israeli right, led by Benjamin Netanyahu and
Ariel Sharon of the Likud, were fundamentally opposed to the kinds
of concessions Rabin, Peres, and Barak were willing to offer. From
1993 onward, Likud and Hamas would reinforce each other’s opposi¬
tion to peace talks, often taking advantage of high-profile provoca¬
tions from one side or the other.

Initially, Hamas found itself outflanked by Oslo. “During the years
of the Oslo peace process (from September 1993 to September 2000)
the political and military sectors of the Islamic movement in which
Hamas predominated were substantively weakened by a number of
factors.” 58 The Israeli Labor government and the PLO combined to
undermine Hamas. In addition to arrests and executions of leaders of
Hamas, secular Palestinians were mobilized to support the peace
talks. Popular opposition to terrorism was widespread. But the Israeli
right, including its terrorist far right, would fatally undermine Oslo.
In February 1994, an Israeli terrorist named Baruch Goldstein, a
member of the extremist Kach movement, entered a mosque in
Hebron, in the West Bank, and murdered dozens of unarmed wor¬
shipers. The massacre invigorated Hamas, which portrayed the attack
as an assault on Islam requiring an armed jihad in response. A wave
of suicide bombings followed. Then, in November 1995, another

Israel’s Islamists • z i

Israeli Likud-inspired terrorist murdered Prime Minister Rabin. The
death of Rabin left a vacuum in Israeli politics, and the continuing sui¬
cide attacks by Hamas panicked the Israeli electorate, leading to the
election of Netanyahu’s Likud in 1996. The tough-talking Netanyahu
launched an unsparing campaign of repression aimed at all Palestin¬
ian groups, and in 1997 he ordered a botched attempt to kill a top
Hamas official in Jordan. But Yassin proved to be a survivor. In the
aftermath of that debacle, Israel and Jordan reached an accord that
freed Sheikh Ahmed Yassin from prison, where he’d languished since
his 1989 arrest. Suddenly Yassin was back in action in Gaza, thunder¬
ing against Oslo and building opposition to the PLO.

The pattern repeated itself in zooo. Netanyahu fell in 1999, and
was replaced by Barak, who reengaged the PLO in negotiations and,
with President Clinton’s help, came close to reaching a comprehensive
deal. Once again, however, the Israeli right provoked the Islamists. In
September zooo, Sharon made a heavy-handed, provocative visit to
an Islamic holy site, the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount, an action
calculated to provoke the Muslim Brotherhood fundamentalists, and
it did. The result was the second intifada (Z000-Z004). Suicide
attacks in Israel murdered scores of Jews, and stampeded security-
minded Israeli voters into Sharon’s camp. Sharon was overwhelm¬
ingly elected prime minister, dooming any chance of a PLO-Israel
deal. Longtime observers of Israeli politics were stunned that Israel
would be led by a man who conducted terrorist attacks against Pales¬
tinians in the 1950s, as head of the infamous Unit 101, and who bore
responsibility for the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees in
the Sabra and Shatila camps near Beirut by Israel’s Phalangist allies,
during the 198Z Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Called “the Bulldozer,”
General Sharon launched an all-out effort to destroy both the PLO
and the Palestinian Authority. Arafat was caught between Hamas and
Sharon: the Islamists would carry out an atrocity, and Sharon would
hold Arafat responsible, retaliating against the PLO.

Both Sharon and the'Bush administration refused to talk to Arafat,
marginalizing the PLO leader and creating further room for Hamas to
grow. The result was predictable. Polls show that in 1996, only 15
percent of Palestinians backed the Islamists; by zooo, it was still only

in • Devil’s Game

17 percent. By 2001, however, 27 percent of Palestinians supported
Hamas, and by 2002, a Birzeit University poll revealed that 42 percent
of Palestinians supported the Hamas idea of an Islamic state. This
was, Roy says, “totally unprecedented.” 59

At times it seemed as if Sharon was intent on demolishing any pos¬
sibility of a PLO-Hamas agreement, even though the Israeli govern¬
ment ostensibly was demanding that the PLO end Hamas’s campaign
of suicide attacks. In 2001, when the PLO secured a Hamas pledge to
halt its terrorist attacks, Sharon ordered the assassination of a top
Hamas official. “Whoever gave the green light to this act of liquida¬
tion knew full well that he was thereby shattering in one blow the
gentlemen’s agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Author¬
ity,” wrote Alex Fishman in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Achronot.
Again, in 2002, only ninety minutes before Hamas’s Yassin was to
announce a cease-fire, Israel bombed a Hamas headquarters in Gaza,
killing seventeen people, including eleven children. Wrote Roy:
“Some analysts maintain that while Hamas leaders are being tar¬
geted, Israeli is simultaneously pursuing its old strategy of promoting
Hamas over the secular nationalist factions as a way of ensuring the
ultimate demise of the [Palestinian Authority], and as an effort to
extinguish Palestinian nationalism once and for all.” 60

Yassin, and several other top Hamas officials, were assassinated by
the Israeli military and secret services in 2004. Yet Hamas continues
to grow. In 2004, Sharon announced plans to withdraw unilaterally
from the Gaza Strip. After years of violence there, Hamas is report¬
edly the most powerful presence on the ground, and if Israel does
withdraw, Hamas will make a play to emerge as the leading force in
Gaza, especially in the vacuum left by the death of Yasser Arafat.

The story of Hamas—from an Israeli experimental pet project to
the PLO’s chief nemesis to the main source of anti-Israeli violence in
Gaza and the West Bank—ran the gamut of Islamist political expan¬
sion from the 1960s to the 1990s and beyond. From an Israeli stand¬
point, the growth and transformation of Hamas over these decades
was an earthquake, and it signaled to many in Israel that political
Islam was not a force to be trifled with. But the radicalization of the
Palestinian Islamist movement was really not an earthquake so much

Israel’s Islamists • 2.13

as an aftershock. The original earthquake was the one that shook Iran
in 1979, toppling the shah and leading to the establishment of the
Islamic Republic of Iran. That event transformed Islamism from being
a non-state actor to the government of one of the region’s most pow¬
erful states, and it excited the Islamic right throughout the region.

For the United States, perhaps, the forces of Islamism being used
against Syria and the PLO were small potatoes. But Iran, one of
America’s twin pillars of the Persian Gulf, was at the heart of U.S.
interests in the region. For the first time, after the Shiite revolution in
Iran, the United States was moved to take a serious look at whether
the Islamic right was a double-edged sword that could pose a serious
threat to the West.

HELL’S AYATOLLAH

Never did a revolution catch the United States more by
surprise than did the one that swamped Iran in 1978-79. For a
moment, it seemed as if the entire U.S. position in the Middle East
might crumble, that Saudi Arabia and the Gulf would fall to a revolu¬
tion like that in Iran, that no Arab monarchy—from Jordan to
Morocco—was safe. Panicky U.S. officials ordered the CIA to deter¬
mine if Iran’s Islamic revolution might spread, and the U.S. govern¬
ment hired a steady stream of experts on Islam to provide insights and
predictions. National security experts worried that the line of defense
along the Soviet Union’s southern flank had been breached and that
the USSR would take advantage of the collapse of Iran to swoop into
the region and supplant the United States.

For the first time, political Islam moved to center stage, and the
consequences would be profound. In Iran, in Afghanistan, in Paki¬
stan, in widening, concentric circles, the Islamic right was no longer a
marginal force but the driving energy behind a potentially region-
wide transformation. For analysts of the big picture, it was no longer
unthinkable to envisage a string of Islamist regimes from North
Africa through Egypt and Sudan to Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia and
into Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Hell’s Ayatollah • 2.15

Yet when the dust cleared, the American position held. Iran—or so
it appeared—was lost to American influence, but the rest of the
empire seemed secure. With the exception of marginal Sudan, where
the Islamic right seized power in the 1980s, the Iranian virus seemed
to have been contained. So for many policy makers, spooks, and spe¬
cialists in the Middle East, it was back to business as usual. The revo¬
lution in Iran was dismissed as a special case, and while Iran itself was
regarded as a regional threat, the United States did not begin to regard
the Islamic right as a significant foe. The United States maintained
close ties—including covert ones, through intelligence liaisons—with
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the two bastions of Sunni Islamic funda¬
mentalism. The Islamist insurrections against Syria and the PLO
crested in the 1980s, and neither one caused any alarm in U.S. policy
circles. And in the 1980s the United States spent more than $3 billion
supporting the Afghan mujahideen, whose political objectives were
difficult to distinguish from those of Iran’s ayatollahs. The American
alliance with the Islamic right rolled on.

In various ways, too, the United States tried to connect with the
Islamic Republic of Iran. The Carter administration’s liberals tried to
befriend the seemingly moderate, American- and European-educated
Islamists around Khomeini, who wore suits instead of clerical garb,
while many U.S. neoconservatives, including officials in President
Reagan’s administration, reached out instead to the hard-core clergy
and the Qom-based ayatollahs who were the real power in Teheran.
Neither of these initiatives bore fruit, however, and Iran for the next
quarter-century would bedevil U.S. policy.

The revolution in Iran stunned and confounded the United States.
A confused, bumbling, and often contradictory policy toward Iran’s
revolutionaries marked U.S. policy from 1977, when the first stirring
of the revolt occurred, through the uprising, the fall of the shah, the
near-civil war that gripped Iran until 1981, and the consolidation of
the clerical regime in the 1980s.

First, Washington exhibited an inertial reliance on its nearly
unlimited confidence in the shah. Throughout the 1970s, U.S. intelli¬
gence reports repeatedly concluded that the shah’s regime was secure,
and these optimistic assessments continued up to the very eve of the

2i6 • Devil’s Game

revolution, leading many U.S. policy makers to believe that the
shah was not seriously threatened. In these reports, Iran’s Islamic
movement was usually ignored or relegated to a footnote. The CIA’s
aid to Iran’s Islamists in 1953 was ancient history, and in the decades
that followed the shah marginalized the ayatollahs, exiling some—
including Khomeini—and buying off others. The State Department
and the CIA complacently ignored Islam in Iran, which suited the shah
just fine: the shah vigorously opposed U.S. contacts with Iran’s clergy,
even with the more docile, pro-regime ayatollahs on the shah’s payroll.

But after the Carter administration got its national security team
in place in 1977, the United States began pressing the Iranian
monarch for reforms and established a pattern of intensive, sub rosa
consultations with Iranian opposition groups, including key religious
leaders. This had the effect of weakening the shah’s resolve, confusing
his regime, and buoying the religious right. The U.S. goal in making
these contacts was not revolution, but what many hoped would be a
more stable, pro-U.S. constitutional monarchy. Part of what was driv¬
ing this effort were persistent rumors—apparently backed by solid
U.S. intelligence reports—that the shah had cancer. (He did, and he
died in exile in 1980.) Those who pursued this policy apparently
believed that the shah was strong enough to weather a transition
peacefully, and that it would result in more power for Iran’s intellec¬
tual elite, the aging heirs of Mohammed Mossadegh’s National Front,
the technocrats, and a smattering of moderate Shiite religious ele¬
ments. What they didn’t realize was that the anti-shah movement
would be driven increasingly by the religious right, above all by the
steely, Lenin-like figure of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Then, however, during the revolution itself—especially from
November 1978 to the capture of Teheran by Khomeini in February
1:979—the Carter administration fell into bitter internal warfare, with
some arguing that the United States ought to abandon the shah and
others urging that the United States support a bloody military putsch
against the revolution. During those crucial four months the United
States had no policy at all, and in any case it was too late to change
the course of events. The shah fled, his government collapsed, and
the Islamic Republic of Iran was born. Those who had argued for

Hell’s Ayatollah • 217

abandoning the shah had clearly underestimated the Islamist revolu¬
tionaries, and now they counted on the emergence of a democratic
successor regime with a slight Islamist tinge, not a dictatorship. Those
who had argued for a coup, which would have led to tens of thou¬
sands of deaths, had also underestimated the depth and power of the
Khomeini movement. Their view was often colored by the insistent,
though absurd, belief that the USSR was behind the trouble in Iran.
How could so powerful an American ally as the shah of Iran be top¬
pled if it weren’t Moscow’s doing?

American policy wasn’t any clearer after the revolution. The
United States had precious few experts on Iran’s Islamist movement.
The U.S. diplomats who went to Iran after the revolution were mostly
not Iran specialists, and they knew little about Islam or about
Khomeini and his ilk. Many of them worked hard to implement the
official policy of trying to work out a modus vivendi with the Islamic
republic, but that policy came crashing down when the U.S. embassy
was invaded by a mob in November 1979. The Western-educated,
suit-wearing aides to Khomeini—men like Ibrahim Yazdi, Sadegh
Ghotbzadeh, and Abolhassan Bani-Sadr—were swept away in the
“second revolution” that followed the embassy takeover, and the
Qom-based clergy and Khomeini asserted near-dictatorial control.

Meanwhile, U.S. hard-liners were not ready to give up on Iran.
Some saw Iran’s Islamic orientation as a threat to the Soviet Union.
They counted on Iran’s fear of its Russian neighbor to the north and
on the Islamists’ hostility to communism to move Iran back into
accord with the United States. Supporters of Israel—and, of course,
Israel itself—saw even the militant mullahs as potential allies. Even
during the U.S. embassy crisis, Reagan and the neoconservatives
made overtures to the mullahs. By the mid-1980s, the neoconserva¬
tives, Israeli intelligence, and Col. Oliver North of the National Secu¬
rity Council joined Bill Casey of the CIA in a secret initiative reaching
out to the strongman of Iran, Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani.

The religious revolution in Iran did more than kick the props out
from underneath America’s most important outpost in the region. It
crystallized a fundamental change in the character of the Islamic
right, one that had been taking shape since the rise of the Muslim

8 • Devil’s Game

Brotherhood decades earlier. As it gained strength in the 1970s, the
Islamic right grew more assertive, and parts of it were radicalized.
Violence-prone offshoots, typified by the emergence of an Islamist ter¬
rorist underground in Egypt, emerged to challenge Western-oriented
regimes, and the terrorist Hezbollah movement gained force in
Lebanon. Even the more mainstream Islamist groups were inspired by
the example of Iran, and many Muslim Brotherhood-linked organiza¬
tions took on a more pronounced political character.

The errors that the United States committed during and after the
revolution in Iran were almost Shakespearean in their tragic scope. An
enormous part of the blame falls on the U.S. intelligence system. The
fall of the shah was the most significant failure of U.S. intelligence
between Pearl Harbor and the attacks of September 11, 2001. As the
United States eagerly lent support to the Afghan jihadists and reached
out to supposedly moderate mullahs in Teheran, almost no one in the
intelligence community was looking at the big picture. To the Ameri¬
can public, the dark-eyed, scowling visage of Ayatollah Khomeini
symbolized the emergence of a threatening new force on the world
scene. But for U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers, right-wing
political Islam continued to be profoundly misunderstood. Even as
Islamism’s power made itself felt—in the violence in Mecca, civil war
in Syria, Sadat’s assassination—the United States failed to grasp its
implications. Even after Iran, Islamism was not seen as a worldwide
movement linked by fraternal bonds and secret societies, but as a frag¬
mented, country-by-country ideological movement. The naive argued
that Iran was a unique case, a conservative dictatorship that had fallen
to a peculiar form of Shiite militancy that would have no resonance
among the Sunni Muslim majority. Others, naive in a different and
more dangerous way, were seized with the notion that Iranian-style
Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood could be mobilized in
Afghanistan and Central Asia as a tool for dismantling the Soviet
Union. Despite the pronounced anti-American feeling at the heart of
Islamism, key officials—from Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, to Ronald Reagan’s CIA director, Bill Casey—
would aggressively pursue the idea that political Islam was just
another pawn on what Brzezinski called “the Grand Chessboard.”

Hell’s Ayatollah • 2.19

The Return of the Ayatollah

On February 2, 1979, just a day after Ayatollah Khomeini made his
triumphant return to Iran, George Lambrakis, a senior U.S. embassy
officer in Teheran, dispatched a long missive to Washington. In it, he
mused about the implications of the takeover of Iran by Khomeini
and his ilk. And he wasn’t too worried. His assessment is worth quot¬
ing at length, because it shows how profoundly the United States
underestimated the Khomeini movement only days before the ayatol¬
lah took control of Iran:

Our best assessment to date is that the Shia Islamic movement is far
better organized, enlightened, and able to resist communism than
its detractors would lead us to believe. It is rooted in the Iranian
people more than any Western ideology, including communism.
However, its governing procedures are not clear, and probably
have not totally been worked out. It is possible that the process of
governing might produce accommodations with anti-clerical, intel¬
lectual strains which exist in the opposition to produce something
more closely approaching Westernized democratic processes than
might at first be apparent....

The Islamic establishment is neither as weak nor as ignorant
as the shah’s government and some Western observers would por¬
tray it. It has a far better grip on the emotions of the people and on
the money of the bazaar than any other group. In many ways it
supports a reformist/traditionalist view of Iran which is far more
attractive to most Iranians at this time than the models of commu¬
nism represented by the Soviet Union or mainland China.

On the other hand, it is not guaranteed to operate in a parlia¬
mentary democratic fashion as we understand it in the West. ... A
good deal of authority is likely to be exercised by an Islamic Coun¬
cil. Though the make-up of such a council is still not clear, under
the movement’s program, political leaders rather than mullahs
would appear destined to play the preponderant role in making
and executing government policy.. . . We suspect that the Moslem
establishment would probably not be able to avoid making some
accommodations with Westernized ideas of government held by
many in the opposition movement. 1

2.2.0 • Devil’s Game

Khomeini had returned to Iran, from Paris, on February i, just a
day before Lambrakis’s memo was written. Nine days later, the interim
government of Iran collapsed and the mullahs created the dictatorship
that has lasted more than a quarter of a century. President Carter wel¬
comed the new Iranian government and optimistically reached out to
its leaders, but ominously, on February 14, a Khomeini-inspired mob
seized control of the U.S. embassy in Iran, only to withdraw after tense
negotiations. Nine months later, a similar mob invaded the embassy
and held scores of American personnel hostage for more than a
year, precipitating one of the greatest diplomatic crises in American his¬
tory. By the end of it, Khomeini reigned unchallenged as Iran’s dictator.

How could Lambrakis have been so wrong? Why did a senior U.S.
government official—and he was not alone—believe that Khomeini
and his clerical mafia would cede power to “political leaders rather
than mullahs”? Why would he describe the Khomeini movement as
“enlightened”? Why would he expect that something “closely
approaching Westernized democratic processes” would emerge?

There is plenty of blame to go around. Neither the State Depart¬
ment, nor the CIA, nor the vaunted community of foreign policy think
tanks, nor academia got Iran right. Most of the blame must go to the
U.S. government, for mixing blind ignorance of Iran with sheer incom¬
petence. But the blindness extended to many leading U.S. academic
specialists on Iran. Several—the University of Texas’s James Bill, the
University of Texas’s Marvin Zonis, and the University of Pittsburgh’s
Richard Cottam, the former CIA officer—acted as semi-official con¬
sultants to the White House and the State Department in 1978-79.
Bill, whose book. The Eagle and the Lion, is often cited as a definitive
work on U.S.-Iran relations, authored a major piece in Foreign Affairs,
the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, in late 1978 that, like
Lambrakis’s missive, also completely missed the mark. Even as
Khomeini thundered against the shah from Iraq and then from France,
and mobs carried photos of the ayatollah down the streets of every
major Iranian city, in “Iran and the Crisis of 1978” Bill concluded that

... the most probable alternative if the Pahlavi dynasty should be
destroyed by force and violence is that a left-wing, progressive

Hell’s Ayatollah •

group of middle-ranking army officers would take charge. . . .
Other future possibilities include a right-wing military junta, a lib¬
eral democratic system based on Western models, and a commu¬
nist government. 2

Nowhere in the piece does Bill even mention the possibility of an
Islamic republic, even though by then Ayatollah Khomeini was the
clearly acknowledged leader of the revolution. Bill, one of the United
States’ few experts on Iran, was not the only one to misread Iran’s
future. As the wave of Iran’s revolution crested in November 1978, a
high-level meeting at the State Department was called to analyze the
unfolding crisis. Henry Precht, the department’s Iran desk officer,
recalls how—despite all the intelligence available to him—he got his
analysis from a handful of Iranian students he met the night before:

Late in November 1978, we called in all the experts on Iran, offi¬
cers who’d served there, others, and we had this big confab to dis¬
cuss what to do about Iran and what was going to happen there.
Well, the night before I’d guest-lectured at a class at American
University, and it turned out there were a lot of Iranian students
there. And when I asked what they thought was going to happen
in Iran, they all said: Islamic government. The next day, at our
conference, we went around the room all saying what we thought
would happen, and people were saying things like, “There will be
a liberal government, with the National Front, and Khomeini will
go to Qom.” When my turn came I said, “Islamic government.” I
was the only one. 3

The fact the U.S. government got Iran so wrong cannot be seen as
anything but a massive intelligence failure. But the failure was not due
to a lack of information, for the revolution was unfolding in the
streets, and Khomeini was not an invisible actor. Yet the United
States, which initially had supreme confidence in the shah of Iran, was
convinced that Iran was stable and not susceptible to revolution. Even
as the revolution gained momentum, and it seemed increasingly clear
that the shah could not survive, the United States refused to believe
that Khomeini and the clergy would seize power for themselves, pre¬
ferring to believe that some sort of religious-secular hybrid democracy

2.2.2. • Devil’s Game

would emerge in the chaos that followed the fall of the shah. Thomas
Ahern, the CIA station chief in Iran in 1979, arrived months after the
revolution and was taken hostage by the Khomeini-directed mob that
seized the embassy on November 4, spending 444 days as a captive.
According to Ahern, the revolution should have been plain to see, for
anyone who cared to look out the window in 1978. He recalls that
when he returned to CIA headquarters in 1981, after being freed, the
agency was bemoaning its failure to anticipate the revolution. “After I
got back, there was a senior person in the Near East Division lament¬
ing the intelligence failure about the fall of the shah,” recalls Ahern.
“And I looked at him and asked him if he hadn’t been looking at what
was going on in the streets!” The CIA, Ahern said, treated the prob¬
lem of pre-revolutionary Iran in traditional spy-versus-spy fashion,
trying to discover secrets about the Khomeini movement and the sta¬
bility of the shah. But, he says, the CIA failed to draw obvious infer¬
ences from what was going on in day-to-day affairs, and so it stuck
with its seemingly safe prediction that the shah was going to survive.
“We joined the rest of the government apparatus in telling the White
House what it wanted to hear, which is that this was just a nuisance
and that the shah was just fine, and that with unlimited support from
the United States he would weather the storm. There was a failure at
the working level to speak truth to power.” 4

In the 1970s, that power rested with three factions in U.S. policy cir¬
cles, each of which approached Iran in different ways, and—each in its
own way—didn’t see Khomeini’s victory coming. For each, Ayatollah
Khomeini was like a Rorschach test, a dark figure in whom specialists
on Iran and senior policy makers could see what they wanted to see. All
made mistakes, and in doing so helped Khomeini succeed.

First were the Kissinger-led realists, who guided U.S. policy toward
Iran in the first half of the decade. For them, Khomeini was nearly
invisible. They’d spent the 1970s building Iran into a regional power,
the policeman of the Gulf, and America’s bulwark against the USSR
and Arab nationalism. Their allies included the CIA, from Richard
Helms, the CIA director appointed as ambassador to Iran in 1973
who as a boy had gone to school with the shah in Switzerland in the

Hell’s Ayatollah • 2.2.3

1930s, to the veterans of 1953, including the Roosevelt brothers: Ker-
mit, the covert operator extraordinaire, and Archie, another CIA
veteran who was a senior official at David Rockefeller’s Chase Man¬
hattan Bank. Kissinger, Helms, the Roosevelts, Rockefeller, and the
big oil and defense firms had spent years turning Iran into a virtual
American colony, especially under President Richard Nixon. They
grumbled at the shah’s occasional efforts to assert independence as
Iran grew stronger, and they were annoyed at the shah’s extravagance
and seeming megalomania. They bristled at the shah’s readiness to
make business deals with the Soviet Union from time to time. But
more important was the bottom line: Iran was hosting tens of thou¬
sands of U.S. military advisers. It was the number-one market for
expensive weapons systems, and could be counted as an ally in the
Cold War everywhere. And it was a very profitable place to do busi¬
ness. Iran was an American outpost at the heart of the world’s oil supply.
During the Carter administration, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national
security adviser, most closely approximated the Nixon-Kissinger view
of Iran.

Second were the Carter administration liberals. For them, Khomeini
was not invisible, but he was a vague force in the background, seem¬
ingly less important than a diverse collection of intellectuals, left-
liberals, reformers, and former National Front activists. The Carter
liberals in Washington were wary of the shah and concerned about the
arms buildup in Iran. Not as hawkish as Brzezinski, they were troubled
by the Nixon-Kissinger willingness to allow the shah a blank check in
building up his military. They were also unhappy with the shah’s record
on human rights and with the authoritarian nature of the regime. In
keeping with Carter’s oft-spoken desire to promote human rights
abroad, they pressed the shah to liberalize the regime. Some clearly felt
that wholesale reform, and even the end of the shah’s regime, was an
important goal of U.S. foreign policy. In that connection, Khomeini’s
forces were seen not as a threat, but as a suitably anti-communist junior
partner in a broad Iranian national reform movement. During the
administration, the liberals were represented by the State Department,
particularly the Iran desk and the human rights team.

224 * Devil’s Game

Third were the hard-right advocates of Cold War supremacy and
American might. Today, they would be called the “neoconservatives.”
During the Carter administration, the right was mostly in opposition,
and it gradually coalesced around candidate Ronald Reagan in the
late 1970s. Closely allied with Israel—which, in turn, was joined with
Iran in an axis against the Arabs—the neoconservatives weren’t fazed
by Khomeini. Though they supported the shah, they didn’t hesitate to
develop close, though covert, connections with the Khomeini regime
after 1979. In 1980, Reagan’s team engaged in secret talks on arms
and hostages with Teheran’s ayatollahs in a calculated effort to under¬
mine Carter, in what has come to be known as the “October Surprise”
scandal. Besides arms, Israel also provided Iran with intelligence
throughout its war with Iraq. And, together, Israel and the neoconser¬
vatives, along with Bill Casey, inaugurated the Iran-contra scandal,
involving yet additional arms sales to Khomeini’s regime, from both
Israel and the United States.

Carter and the Shah

The inauguration of Jimmy Carter as president alarmed the shah and
encouraged the Iranian opposition, from the intellectuals in the
National Front to the ayatollahs of the Islamic right. Carter’s inaugu¬
ration in 1977, for many Iranians, triggered memories of an earlier
period in U.S.-Iran relations—not the CIA’s 1953 coup d’etat, which
restored the shah to power, but the early 1960s, when the Kennedy
administration toyed with the idea of unseating the shah and replac¬
ing him with a less authoritarian regime. The Carter White House
placed great emphasis on human rights, and many administration
officials objected to the old policy of building up the shah’s power.

Both the monarchy and the mullahs remembered the Kennedy
administration, and they saw it as a precedent. During the Kennedy
years, John Bowling, the Iran specialist at the State Department,
wrote a paper analyzing Iran’s opposition forces and “discussing the
advantages of a Western policy shift of support for a nationalist, more
popularly based, Mosaddiqist coup.” 5 But the doubts about the shah

Hell’s Ayatollah • 225

didn’t start with Kennedy, according to a former high-ranking CIA
official who was involved in the discussions:

There was a big debate, in the U.S. government and in the
embassy: Should we support the shah, or a nationalist govern¬
ment? This had been going on since about 1958, when the
National Front reconstituted itself. The question was: Do we want
to supplant the shah or support the nationalists? There was talk
about something like a British-style monarchy, with real power
resting in an elected government. In the end, Kennedy made the
decision to support the shah, but on condition that there would be
real reforms, and that the shah would accept [the reformist] Ali
Amini as prime minister. 6

In his book, James Bill noted: “Kennedy’s doubts about the shah were so
strong that he even considered forcing his abdication in favor of rule by
regency until his young son came of age.” 7 In principle, Kennedy’s con¬
cern about the shah wasn’t misplaced, but the problem in the early
1960s, as in the late 1970s, was that no alternative existed outside of the
clergy to replace the shah. The National Front had lost nearly all of its
support in the years since Mossadegh, and increasingly it was confined
to salons in Teheran, with allies among intellectuals in Western Europe.

Pressed by the United States, the shah made halfhearted efforts at
reform, in what he called the White Revolution. Sensing blood, the
clergy had begun to stir, and in the outlying districts the religious
right—which had close ties to the wealthy landed families—began to
mobilize the population against land reform. Violent incidents took
place in many provinces and the prime movers were the mullahs,
increasingly led by Ruhollah Khomeini. Not yet an ayatollah, he came
to prominence after making a demagogic speech in 1963 denouncing
the shah. To create his political organization, Khomeini established
the Coalition of Islamic Societies, led by twenty-one wealthy bazaari
merchants from three major Teheran mosques. Many of the partici¬
pants in Khomeini’s coalition would later become the leaders of the
regime in 1979 and serve as top officials of the Islamic Republican
Party, including Mohammed Hosseini Beheshti. 8

zz6 • Devil’s Game

The shah had nothing but disdain for the clergy. In a January 1963
speech, he sputtered with rage at the Khomeini-led mullahs:

They were always a stupid and reactionary bunch whose brains
have not moved [for] a thousand years. Who is opposing [the
White Revolution]? Black reaction, stupid men who don’t
understand it and are ill intentioned. ... It was they who formed
a small and ludicrous gathering from a handful of bearded,
stupid bazaaris to make noises. They don’t want this country to
develop . 9

Such talk didn’t endear the shah to the clergy. In 1963, Khomeini was
arrested by SAVAK. Rumors circulated that he was to be tried and
executed. But it was unprecedented to impose the death penalty on an
ayatollah. In 1964, Khomeini was expelled from Iran, first to Turkey
and then to Iraq, settling in the holy city of Najaf, where he would
remain until 1978.

In 1977, recalling the Kennedy years, the shah and the clergy both
anticipated that the new U.S. regime might begin to put pressure on
the monarchy, creating room for the clergy to organize. Indeed, it did.
According to the Iranian ambassador in London, the shah feared
“that Jimmy Carter might have ‘Kennedy-type pretensions.’” 10 The
shah had cracked down on his clerical opposition once again in the
early 1970s, arresting many of Khomeini’s allies, including Ali Akbar
Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the future strongman of the Khomeini regime.
But the election of Carter, whose commitment to human rights res¬
onated in Iran, stirred the clergy once again. In May 1977, Cyrus
Vance, the U.S. secretary of state, visited Teheran to see the shah.
“After Vance’s visit, the word spread quickly through the extensive
Iranian grapevine that the shah had just been given his orders from
Washington: liberalize or be removed,” wrote Bill. “It soon became
accepted fact in Teheran.... The opposition . . . concluded that they
could now operate under an American protective umbrella that had
been raised by Cyrus Vance.” 11

According to Charles Cogan, a former CIA official who headed
the agency’s Near East Division, Vance foresaw a peaceful revolution
in Iran leading to a regime that might even include Khomeini:

Hell’s Ayatollah • 227

Vance and, shall we say, the State Department in general looked
forward towards the possibility of a smooth transition whereby
the monarchy would cede some power to the dissidents who were
considered to be not just Khomeini but moderates around him,
and there were some, and this could be a successful transition to
the parliamentary constitutional monarchy . 12

Slowly at first, and then accelerating as the rebellion against the
shah gathered momentum, U.S. embassy officers, visiting American
officials, the CIA, and semi-official envoys from Washington began
making contacts with the opposition. “The shah was very angry in the
late 19 70s over the fact that opposition figures and members of the
clergy were going in and out of the U.S. embassy,” says Juan Cole, a
University of Michigan professor and expert on Islam. 13 That view is
confirmed by Charles Naas, a senior political officer at the U.S.
embassy in Teheran, who worked under Ambassador Bill Sullivan.
Sullivan, a tough-talking Irishman who served in some rough-and-
tumble posts, including Laos during the CIA’s covert war in that
country, arrived in Iran in 1977, replacing Helms. According to Naas,
Sullivan aggressively sought contacts with the anti-shah opposition:
“When Bill Sullivan went out, I told him that I’d never worked on a
country where I knew less about the politics there,” says Naas.
“When he got there, he started encouraging the political section to go
out and meet more people, and they talked to young technocrats and
National Front people, including a few people who had a good feel
for the religious leaders.” 14

The shah, says Naas, “was aware that we had changed our m.o.
and had started encouraging the opposition.” In his memoirs, the
shah put it this way: “The Americans wanted me out. ... I was never
told about the split in the Carter administration [nor] about the hopes
some U.S. officials put in the viability of an ‘Islamic Republic’ as a
bulwark against communism.” 15

The key player in bridging the divide between the secular National
Front and the clergy was Mehdi Bazargan, the founder of the Liberation
Movement, a religious, pro-clerical party. Destined to become the first
prime minister of Iran after the revolution, Bazargan had a long

228 • Devil’s Game

history of working with the mullahs, but he also maintained a long-
running dialogue with U.S. State Department and CIA officers. In
fact, Bazargan himself was a quasi-mullah. “Bazargan,” says an ex-
CIA operations officer who served in Iran, “was basically an ayatol¬
lah, or what they called an ‘ayatollah without a turban.’” Ift
Inevitably, the U.S. effort to reach out to the opposition not only dis¬
mayed the shah but emboldened the opposition, especially its reli¬
gious component. “These signals were mistaken by Bazargan and
others,” says Naas. “After the revolution, Bazargan told me, ‘You
have no idea how encouraged we were by President Carter.’ I’his is
one of those signals that goes wrong.”

From his post at the United Nations, Fereydoun Hoveyda, Iran’s
ambassador, watched as the Carter administration undermined the
shah. A coalition was emerging between the opposition liberals,
Bazargan’s religious movement, and the Khomeini-led clergy. “The
Americans were in constant contact with the liberals in Iran after
1977,” he says. “They told these liberals, especially Bazargan and the
National Front, that the time had come to come out with dissent and
protest. That I know for sure. Some of them told me at the time: the
Americans are telling us, ‘It’s time to protest.’... I told [Americans]
that it was like playing with fire. You are bringing in the worst possi¬
ble enemy of the West.” A top official in the State Department recalls
a meeting in 1977 during which he used the very same words. “Jessica
Tuchman and some of the other people on the National Security
Council staff were arguing against supporting the shah, arguing
against supplying him with tear gas to use against the demonstra¬
tors,” he says. “And I told them: ‘You don’t know what you are talk¬
ing about. You have no idea of the political dynamics of Iran, because
nobody does. You’re playing with fire.’ ” 17

U.S. Intelligence and Iran

Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution unfolded in slow motion, over sev¬
eral years. Only the most obtuse could be surprised at its outcome.

A string of U.S. intelligence reports on Iran were wildly off the

Hell’s Ayatollah • 229

mark. A State Department analysis written in May 1972 suggests that
even then some diplomats saw Khomeini as embodying “liberal val¬
ues,” albeit with diminishing appeal:

The Shah of Iran maintains a posture of public piety and champi¬
ons Islamic causes even though Iranians... are not greatly
attracted by pan-lslamic sentiments. The Iranian clergy no longer
have major political influence. . . . They have been, for the past
decade, fighting a rear-guard and losing action against the grow¬
ing tide of a secular state.. . . Ayatollah Khomeini, arrested and
exiled to Iraq in 1964 as a result of his anti-government activities,
aspires to lead Iranian Muslims, but his close cooperation with the
Government of Iraq in anti-Shah propaganda and activity have
ruled out any chance of reconciliation with the present shah and
reduced his appeal to many Iranian Muslims who might otherwise
share some of his basically liberal values. 18

Charles Naas, who served as the State Department’s director of Iran
affairs from 1974 to 1978, and then served as deputy chief of mission
in Teheran during the revolution, says that throughout the period lead¬
ing up to 1979, U.S. government analysis of Iran was poor, especially
when it came to so-called National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), pre¬
pared by the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. “In doing NIEs at
the time, the general view was that the religious right didn’t represent a
threat to the regime,” Naas says. “There was practically no reporting
on the Islamic groups in the country, so we were caught relatively flat-
footed.” In the August 1977 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran,
“Iran in the 1980s,” the CIA concluded that “the shah will be an
active participant in Iranian life well into the 1980s” and that “there
will be no radical change in Iranian political behavior in the near
future.” A year later, in August 1978, a second CIA report concluded
that Iran seemed to be headed for a smooth transition of power if and
when the shah left the scene. The CIA went on to say: “Iran is not in a
revolutionary or even a ‘pre-revolutionary’ situation.” 19 By 1978,
President Carter, who was watching Iran disintegrate on television,
complained in writing to the national security bureaucracy, saying that

• 30 • Devil’s Game

he was “dissatisfied with the quality of political intelligence” he was
getting on Iran. 20 Yet the CIA, lacking Iran specialists, Farsi speakers,
and experts on Islamism, could not do better.

Admiral Stansfield Turner was Carter’s CIA director. “In 1977,
Islam as a political force was not on our radar scope,” he says. “The
intelligence community was not adequately prepared to understand it.
We underestimated Khomeini’s potential by a large margin.” 21 But it
was worse than that. Outside of a handful of Iran specialists, virtually
no one in the Carter administration had any idea of who Khomeini
was until it was too late. Henry Precht, who served as the Iran desk
officer in 1978, recalls getting a dispatch from Teheran at the height
of the revolutionary fervor. “The department received a cable from
the embassy in Teheran, mentioning Khomeini and identifying him as
‘an Iranian religious leader,’” says Precht. “To have identified him
like that to your readers back in Washington told me that there wasn’t
a great awareness of who he was.”

Although thousands of Americans, including hundreds of U.S.
officials and a major CIA station were based in Iran, few if any of
them had any familiarity with Iran’s subcultures, religious under¬
ground, and opposition forces. Virtually all U.S. officials who have
written memoirs about the Iranian revolution recall that the United
States relied on the shah and his inner circle for information about
Iran’s internal politics. Partly that was because Washington trusted
the shah implicitly and believed that his intelligence and security sys¬
tem were infallible, and partly it was because the shah strongly
objected to any efforts by the United States to contact the clergy and
the opposition. Walter Cutler, a veteran U.S. diplomat who served in
Tabriz, Iran’s second largest city, in the 1960s, says that even then it
was difficult to establish contact with the clergy. “In Tabriz, when I was
there, I was instructed to talk to the mullahs,” he recalls. “But it was
clear with the shah: Don’t mess around the religious elements. There
was a healthy presence by SAVAK.” 22 By the 1970s, when Nixon and
Kissinger established the U.S. partnership with the shah, U.S. officials
were discouraged by Washington, too, to stay away from the opposi¬
tion and the religious elements. The huge CIA station in Iran was

Hell’s Ayatollah • 231

focused primarily on Cold War objectives, keeping track of Soviet
bloc personnel in Iran and overseeing the U.S. surveillance apparatus
aimed at the USSR in northern Iran.

A senior CIA official who served in Iran said that because the shah
was an ally who didn’t want U.S. spies meddling with the clergy, the
religious opposition was off-limits. 23 Precht indicates that U.S. con¬
tacts with the clergy were being carefully tracked by Iran’s intelligence
service. “At one point, the embassy political officer had arranged to
go talk to a mullah,” says Precht. “And the ambassador got a call
from the minister of the court, saying, ‘Your political officer has an
appointment with so-and-so.’ We don’t think that’s a good idea.’” 24

Beginning in the mid-1970s, however, rumblings were picked up,
remotely at first, by the U.S. intelligence community. According to
several U.S. officials, the first to sense trouble were the British, who
were able to draw on their centuries-long presence in the country, and
the Israelis, whose secret service, the Mossad, was plugged into the
bazaar. “The best sources I had were the British,” says Precht. “They
were much more informed, much more insightful. And their report¬
ing, their assessments were not upbeat.” Israel, too, sensed that the
shah was finished long before the United States did. Around 1976,
says Precht, while he was escorting a U.S. senator on a tour of Iran,
they began with a briefing from Ambassador Helms, who told the
senator that Iran was secure. “Well, we went to see Uri Lubrani, the
man in charge of representing Israel in Iran, and he said that the shah
was facing a serious problem from his religious opposition. That was
the first time I’d heard that. No one in the embassy was saying that.”
Two years later, according to Precht, the warnings from Israel were
more urgent. “In 1978, an Israeli foreign service officer came to see us
at the Department, and he said: ‘We are already in the post-shah era.’
He told us, we should prepare ourselves.” 25 At the time, most U.S.
government officials believed that the shah would weather the storm.

Starting in the mid-1970s, it began to dawn on policy makers and
U.S. intelligence officials that the shah would fall. “You could take a
calendar of 1977 and 1978,” says Harold Saunders, who was then
the assistant secretary of state for Near East and South Asian affairs,

132- • Devil’s Game

“and put people on the calendar as to when they decided that the
shah’s regime could not endure.”

A critical, but previously unexamined aspect of U.S. decision mak¬
ing on Iran in the 1970s is related to the shah’s fatal illness. It is
important because if it were known that the shah was fatally stricken,
it would drastically affect all calculations about Iran’s future; were the
shah to die in office, with no clear mode of transferring power, a very
real danger would exist that Iran could plunge into chaos. The shah’s
illness was diagnosed as early as 1969, according to Hoveyda, whose
brother was Iran’s prime minister. “It was only in the mid-1970s that
I heard that he had cancer,” he says, though it was a closely guarded
secret. But he insists: “The United States must have known, because
secrets like that cannot be kept, especially because the shah got sec¬
ond and third opinions, and he was consulting with American physi¬
cians, too.” 26 Carter administration policy makers and intelligence
officials provide conflicting testimony about how much the United
States knew about the shah’s cancer, and when it learned about it.
Harold Saunders, the Middle East chief at the State Department, says
that the United States did not know that the shah was sick until after
he’d left Iran. But Charles Cogan, the ex-CIA official, said that the
Iran crisis in fact began “when the shah’s illness became apparent, not
to us but to the French, very early in ’72. And I think that we finally
became aware of the gravity of it in ’76.” 27 According to Cogan,
Richard Helms, who was U.S. ambassador to Teheran, suspected that
the shah had cancer and told Washington so. “I think it was ’75 that
Helms wrote something to that effect back to Washington, but it
seemed to escape people’s attention,” says Cogan. “The French were
aware of this as far back as 1972, because one of the doctors that was
treating the shah was in some way affiliated with the French intelli¬
gence service.” 28 Another senior CIA official with enormous experi¬
ence in Iran says flatly: “We knew the shah was ill. We had reports
from—well, from a very good source.” 29 By the late 1970s, it wasn’t
hard for U.S. intelligence to put two and two together, and to con¬
clude that the shah was nearing the end of the road. David Long, who
worked in the State Department’s intelligence bureau, says that it was

Hell’s Ayatollah • 233

enough to make actionable judgments: “The fact that the shah was ill,
that he had cancer, was known. But it was very closely held. But we
knew enough, the worker-bees, to know that this guy was in heavy
doo-doo. It was our job to handicap this.” 30

Among the very last to come to the conclusion that the shah was
finished were Brzezinski and the Rockefeller-Kissinger pro-shah parti¬
sans, who clung to the belief late into 1978 that the shah would sur¬
vive. The U.S. embassy in Teheran was slow to realize the extent of
the threat to the shah, but U.S. consulates outside the capital were
more in tune with the pulse of the country, and their reporting back to
Washington was somewhat more perceptive. Individual CIA experts,
some of whom had spent years in Iran, were among the first to under¬
stand that Iran was collapsing. “I left Iran in 1976, and I told four
close friends to get their money out of the country, that Iran was
going down the tubes,” says one CIA officer. 31 But that pessimism
didn’t find its way into the rosy-scenario intelligence estimates pre¬
pared for the U.S. government.

Ambassador Sullivan, in Teheran, held on to the belief in the sum¬
mer of 1978 that the shah’s regime would continue. In his memoirs,
Mission to Iran, he noted that some diplomats felt that the shah would
fall, citing in particular a French embassy official who “expected the
shah to be overthrown within a year.” Yet, said Sullivan: “We felt that
the shah was in trouble ... but we did not see the beginnings of a revo¬
lution.” 32 A year earlier, in a dispatch to Washington entitled “Straws
in the Wind,” Sullivan had taken note of growing religious unrest in
Iran, adding: “There are hints that despite their right-wing fanaticism,
some of the more pragmatic conservative Islamic imams and ayatol¬
lahs are willing to ride the human rights horse into alliance with those
on the left [i.e., the National Front] where mutual interests can be
made to coincide.” Obliquely, Sullivan mentioned that religious
“restiveness” had been reinforced by a parallel revival of Islamism in
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, but concluded that the shah’s gov¬
ernment would keep the religious movement “under control.” 33 In his
memoirs, Sullivan admits that he was mystified about Islam and that
neither his staff nor the CIA could help him:

234 * Devil’s Game

My efforts to penetrate further into the mysteries of Shiism were
constantly frustrated. . . . Neither our political officers nor our
intelligence officers were able to satisfy my interest in obtaining
further insights into the workings of the Shia mind . 34

Richard Cottam and the “Americans”

One former U.S. official who purported to understand the “Shia mind”
was Richard Cottam. In the early and mid-1950s, Cottam served in Iran
as part of the CIA’s covert operations team. “He was a case officer of
mine,” says John Waller, the station chief in Iran in the late 1940s and
early 1950s. 35 Cottam became a University of Pittsburgh professor in
1958, but didn’t leave either the CIA or skullduggery far behind. During
the 1960s and 1970s, Cottam maintained close ties to Iranian dissidents,
from the National Front to leading religious figures. He was especially
close to two men who would serve, in 1978, as Khomeini’s closest aides
during his exile in Paris, while the revolution in Iran was unfolding:
Ibrahim Yazdi and Sadegh Ghotbzadeh—nicknamed “the Americans.”
Both men spent many years living in or visiting the United States, and
both worked with the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Muslim Students
Association, which Yazdi helped to found in 1963. Cottam had first met
Yazdi in Iran in the 1950s, while working as a CIA officer, and the two
men became close friends. During the 1960s, Yazdi traveled back and
forth between Iran, Paris, and the United States, working with
Ghotbzadeh and many other religious-minded Iranian activists who sup¬
ported Ayatollah Khomeini. In 1967, Yazdi settled in Houston, Texas,
taking up a research and teaching post at Baylor Medical College.

Early in 1978, Cottam’s name began to show up in secret or confi¬
dential State Department and CIA dispatches from Iran. In May, John
Stempel from the U.S. embassy in Iran met with a leader of the pro-
Khomeini movement, Mohammad Tavakoli, who “asked if Stempel
knew Professor Richard Cottam.” According to a dispatch from
Stempel, Tavakoli asked “if Stempel had some way of proving that he
was a State Department officer and whether he would mind his name
being checked with Professor Cottam.” 36 A few weeks later, Stempel
met Tavakoli with Bazargan, the leader of what was now called the

Hell’s Ayatollah • Z35

National Liberation Movement, and Tavakoli—obviously referring
to Cottam—curiously asked if the Carter administration has a “sepa¬
rate channel” into the embassy outside State Department channels.
“He noted that the Movement had supplied much information to
Richard Cottam when he was a State Department officer and contin¬
ued to do so,” wrote Stempel. 37 Cottam continued to make back-and-
forth visits to Teheran and Paris, where he met Khomeini, Yazdi, and
Ghotbzadeh. In June 1978, Charles Naas of the U.S. embassy wrote
to Henry Precht, the Iran desk officer: “We find it fascinating that
Richard Cottam, as several of us had thought, is still a principal con¬
tact for the [Liberation Movement] in the U.S., and they were willing
to confirm this.” 38 By December, when the revolution was clearly
about to succeed, a confidential State Department dispatch from the
embassy noted rumors that Cottam had secretly traveled to Teheran.
“To the best of our knowledge, Cottam is not here. Would appreciate
it if Department could discreetly confirm his presence in Pittsburgh.”

But by then Cottam was seeking to establish overt connections
between Yazdi, Ghotbzadeh, and others in the Khomeini circle with
official Washington, outside State Department channels. Precht says
that Cottam repeatedly tried to open a dialogue between Khomeini’s
circle and the U.S. government. In late 1978, says Precht, Cottam
“said that Ibrahim Yazdi was coming to Washington, and that we
ought to meet him. And he called Gary Sick at the NSC with the same
idea. But Cottam was persona non grata at the State Department,
because he had all those contacts with Iranian dissidents. . . . Some¬
times, the people in the human rights office, under Steve Cohen, dealt
with them.” Eventually Precht and other State Department officials
did open a dialogue with the revolutionaries, including Yazdi and
Shahriar Rouhani, Yazdi’s son-in-law. The meetings continued in
Paris, and in Teheran Cottam introduced U.S. embassy officials to
Ayatollah Beheshti, who was Khomeini’s official representative in
Iran in the months before the revolution. The Iranians assured the
U.S. officials that Khomeini was not to be feared, and that he did not
have political ambitions for himself. 39

A few months later, Khomeini had seized power, and he began to
construct the institutions that would guarantee that power would

2.7,6 • Devil’s Game

remain in the hands of the clergy for the next quarter-century: the
komitebs, or Islamic committees; the pasdaran, the guard; various
bodies of Islamic “experts” and jurists; the Islamic courts; the revolu¬
tionary council. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of officials from the
shah’s era were summarily executed, and countless others were mur¬
dered by Khomeini’s followers.

After the Revolution

The United States struggled to recover from the shock of the January-
February 1979 revolution in Iran.

A major effort was made to establish something resembling nor¬
mal diplomatic relations with the new regime in Teheran, but they got
off to a bad start. “We wanted to establish a dialogue,” says Walter
Cutler, the veteran U.S. diplomat assigned to be America’s ambassa¬
dor to the Islamic Republic in the middle of 1979. “I was to go out
there and try to establish some sort of rapport with the new regime,
from Khomeini on down.” 40 Cutler had served in Iran as consul in
Tabriz in the mid-1960s, and spent much of the 1980s as U.S. ambas¬
sador to Saudi Arabia. Named to succeed Bill Sullivan, the outgoing
U.S. ambassador who was fatally tainted by his association with the
shah, Cutler was asked to assemble an Iran team quickly. “My
appointment was pretty rushed, and I had to put together a whole
new team fast. [Secretary of State Cyrus] Vance said, ‘Pick anyone
you want, and I will break their assignment,’” meaning that Vance
would reassign to Iran anyone Cutler wanted. What Cutler didn’t
know, of course, is that many of the people assigned to his team
would be taken hostage in November and held for fifteen months
under brutal conditions.

“We had to prove to the Iranians that we were not the Great
Satan,” says Cutler. The fact that the Iranian revolution was based on
Islam, not left-wing nationalism, was something that encouraged
many U.S. policy makers, diplomats, and CIA officials, from Zbigniew
Brzezinski at the NSC on down. “We were in the Cold War,” says
Cutler, “and here was an Islamic revolution, and I’d been there long

Hell’s Ayatollah • 2 . 37

enough to know what suspicion existed about the Russians. I thought
that we could handle the possibility that the Soviet Union might try to
increase its influence, because of the strength of Islam. ... If you’re
looking for common interests, our shared concern about Soviet pene¬
tration of that part of the world was one.”

But Cutler never reached Iran. A congressional resolution con¬
demning Khomeini in 1979 infuriated the ayatollah, and, according
to Cutler, Yazdi later told him that Khomeini wanted to break rela¬
tions with the United States entirely. Instead Yazdi persuaded Khome¬
ini to take just a “half step” and to refuse the ambassador. Cutler’s
appointment was withdrawn. 41 But other U.S. officials, most of them
fated to be taken captive in November, began arriving. Some, but not
all, had served in Iran before but virtually none had any experience
with or knowledge of Islamism.

Bruce Laingen, who headed the embassy in the absence of an
ambassador, had two brief stints in Iran before but says frankly, “I am
no expert on the subject of Islam.” He was plucked from an assign¬
ment that would have taken him to Japan and hustled to Iran, because
the State Department was “casting around for available, dispensable,
transferable FSOs [foreign service officers].” Did he get a lot of prep¬
aration to deal with Islam and Khomeini’s ideology? “No,” he says.
“Almost none.” 42 Thomas Ahern, the new CIA station chief, calls his
appointment a “bureaucratic accident,” and says that he received no
help from the U.S. government that enabled him to understand the
dynamic of Khomeini’s Islamic movement. “You can quote me as say¬
ing that there was no instruction of an academic sort on the politics,
culture, and economics of Iran,” he says. “It was strictly a trade-
school type of thing, preparing me to take over certain functions and
certain contacts.” 43 John Limbert, another veteran U.S. diplomat who
spoke fluent Farsi, responded to a “volunteer cable, saying something
like, ‘We need people to go to Iran to help rebuild, or salvage some¬
thing out of these events.’ Naive as I was, I and many of my colleagues
felt that now we could finally establish a healthy relationship with
Iran.” But did Limbert, Laingen, and their fellow officers understand
Islam, or the nature of Khomeini’s religious-right following? “We
didn’t know it,” says Limbert. “We didn’t understand it.” 44 By

2.38 • Devil’s G

November, Laingen, Ahern, Limbert, and scores of colleagues would
be prisoners of a mob secretly directed by Khomeini.

The new Iranian government was a two-headed creature. There
was the “official” government: Prime Minister Bazargan, Yazdi,
Ghotbzadeh, and the man who would eventually be elected as the first
president of the Islamic Republic, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr. Then there
was the unofficial, parallel government, consisting of Khomeini, a
handful of key ayatollahs, the komitehs, the pasdaran, and the hard¬
core set of Islamist institutions that were taking shape to implement
Khomeini’s theocracy. The new U.S. embassy team and visiting CIA
and State Department officials were confined, for the most part, to
interaction with the ever-less-powerful official government, while
Khomeini kept the United States at arm’s length. Khomeini embarked
on a plan to isolate and destroy, one by one, all of the secular, left-
wing, and moderate religious forces that had joined the anti-shah rev¬
olution in the 1970s. His ultimate goal was the consolidation of
virtually all power under his personal control and in the Revolution¬
ary Council, the shadowy body that was made up primarily of pro-
Khomeini ayatollahs.

According to Laingen:

We had very little contact with the clergy. I never saw Khomeini.

And we never really talked to the Revolutionary Council. We
sensed they were there. We knew they were there. But we didn’t
appreciate how much power they really had. We saw our mission
as to reiterate our acceptance of the Islamic revolution, and to
communicate that we were a spiritual-minded country. That it was
feasible for the United States to come to an understanding with
political Islam, and that the shah had no future. We recognized that
Khomeini would not be disestablished. But we were caught up in
the belief that the secular side of the revolution would prevail.
Bazargan, Yazdi, and Ghotbzadeh believed that they would be able
to cope, that they would manage to contain Khomeini’s influence. 45

Embassy officials did talk to a limited number of mostly more moder¬
ate Shiite clergy, but it didn’t do much to open doors to Khomeini’s
inner circle. Many of the more cooperative Islamist mullahs were

Hell’s Ayatollah • Z39

pushed aside, assassinated, or forced into exile as Khomeini consoli¬
dated power.

The embassy wasn’t getting much help from the CIA, either, which
failed to produce any intelligence estimates about the future of Iran in
1979. Says Ahern:

I don’t recall any estimate or forecast of what would happen.
What Washington wanted from the embassy as a whole was to be
encouraging, supporting the Yazdis, the Bazargans, in hope of
moderating, or helping them moderate the regressive tendencies of
the regime. As I recall, this was all on the level of wistful hope, not
on the level of serious planning or based on indications from Irani¬
ans that this was going to work. 46

But if the CIA wasn’t producing many conclusions about the future of
Iran, it was asked to pass on to Iran crucial intelligence about Iran’s
neighbor, Iraq. Yet less than a year later the two countries would be
engaged in a bloody, decade-long conflict that reportedly left more
than a million dead. Besides the CIA station chief, other senior CIA
officials, including Robert Ames and George Cave, made visits to Iran
in 1979, before the embassy takeover. On at least one occasion,
Ames—who headed the CIA’s Near East Division—met with Ayatollah
Beheshti, and other agency officials met Yazdi, Amir Abbas Entezam,
and other non-clergy Iranian officials. A system of intelligence sharing
was established, particularly in connection with Iraq. “Once the
Bazargan government was established, we tried to do business with
them,” recalls a CIA official involved with Iran at the time, adding
that the CIA warned Iran in 1979 about Iraqi war intentions. 47
Laingen confirms reports that the United States passed on intelligence
to Iran about Iraq:

We had concern over Iraq. Relations between Iran and Iraq were
close to their lowest point, and Khomeini had enormous distaste
for Saddam Hussein. He had a desire to export the revolution to
Iraq. Iraq was certainly a major target. I recall briefing the Irani¬
ans on American intelligence on Iraq. We gave them information
about Iraq’s military capacity, troop emplacements, intentions. It

2.40 • Devil’s Game

was a new experience for me, suddenly being involved in the intel¬
ligence side of diplomacy. 48

While the United States passed on intelligence to the mullahs, includ¬
ing Beheshti, it gradually became clear that the Bazargans, Yazdis,
and Ghotbzadehs had virtually no power, and that the Shiite clergy
controlled everything. That was especially true in connection with the
military. “There was no coordination between Bazargan and the mili¬
tary. I know this for a fact,” says a former CIA official. “The military
was under the ironclad control of the mullahs. And the mullahs
divided Iran into seventeen villages, and assigned people to run each
one, through the komitehs .” 49

Even so, a handful of U.S. policy makers began to see Iran’s
Islamist orientation as threatening to the USSR. One of the most sur¬
prising to reach that conclusion was Brzezinski, the hard-line national
security adviser who’d been an advocate for using a military coup in
Iran to stop Khomeini’s revolution. Gradually, Brzezinski changed his
mind, envisioning what he called an “arc of crisis” stretching from
northeast Africa to central Asia. It was a high-stakes zone of conflict
between the two superpowers, and it subsumed a region entirely
imbued with the Islamic resurgence. Henry Precht, who had been one
of the U.S. officials most opposed to the shah and who favored trying
to establish good relations with the Islamic Republic, recalls the situa¬
tion in the middle of 1979:

After the revolution, we still considered Iran to be terribly impor¬
tant to U.S. interests. At one point Hal Saunders [assistant secre¬
tary of state for Near East affairs] went to the White House for a
meeting, and when he came back he told me, “You’ll be very
pleased. We’re going to try to develop new relations with Iran.”
There was this idea that the Islamic forces could be used against
the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and
so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets. It was
a Brzezinski concept. 50

Brzezinski, in his memoirs, says that he began to press for an all-
encompassing U.S. security policy along the arc of crisis even before

Hell’s Ayatollah • 24

the Iranian revolution had run its course. By that, he meant strong
U.S. military ties to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey, four
Muslim countries inside the arc, flanking U.S. support in Oman,
Somalia, and Kenya, and U.S. bases in several countries and in the
Indian Ocean. “By late 1978,” wrote Brzezinski, “I began to press the
‘arc of crisis’ thesis, [arguing] for a new ‘security framework’ to
reassert U.S. power and influence in the region.” 51

Brzezinski saw the loss of the shah as “catastrophic,” according to
Cottam. At first Brzezinski wanted an Iranian Pinochet, a military dic¬
tator who would suppress the Islamic revolution at any cost, but
when that became impossible Brzezinski opted for a “de facto alliance
with the forces of Islamic resurgence and with the regime of the
Islamic Republic of Iran,” wrote Cottam. “Stability was not even
implicitly his objective. His primary concern was to form an effective
anti-Soviet alliance in the region he described as an ‘arc of crisis.’ By
the summer of 1979 Brzezinski was convinced of the sincerity of
Khomeini’s fierce anti-communism.” 52

A few months later, in pursuit of that dream, Brzezinski met in
Algiers with Prime Minister Bazargan, Foreign Minister Yazdi, and
Defense Minister Mustafa Chamran. The timing, however, could not
have been worse. Weeks earlier, the Carter administration had
allowed the dying shah, stricken with cancer, to come to New York
for medical care. It was a move that inflamed Khomeini’s most radical
followers, and Khomeini seized on it to move against the Bazargan-
Yazdi faction in the Iranian government, just three days after the
Brzezinski-Bazargan encounter in Algiers. What seemed at the time to
be a spontaneously assembled mob of students invaded the grounds
of U.S. embassy in Teheran, and one of the most significant diplo¬
matic crises in U.S. history was launched. With its diplomats captive,
there was no possibility for dialogue between the United States and
Iran. The Iranian government maintained the polite fiction that the
hostage takers were simply militant “students,” but there is no doubt
that the entire action was carefully orchestrated by Khomeini and
his inner circle as a means of consolidating the political power of
the unofficial, parallel government that had been growing in strength

242. • Devil’s Game

alongside the official one. Vladimir Kuzichkin, the KGB station chief
in Teheran who defected to the West a few years later, had direct
information on who organized the terrorist operation. “We knew
from our sources who it was who sanctioned and then carried out the
seizure of the embassy,” wrote Kuzichkin. “The seizure was sanc¬
tioned at the very summit of the Iranian leadership, and was carried
out by a trained team that consisted exclusively of members of the
Corps of Revolutionary Guards.” 53

The Carter administration had not the slightest clue about how to
deal with Khomeini after the embassy takeover. Countless books,
memoirs, and scholarly papers have been written about the hostage
crisis. But nothing sums up the futility of Carter’s efforts better than a
passage from the memoir of Hamilton Jordan, the president’s chief of
staff, who had a lead responsibility for resolving the standoff. Jordan
describes seeing Carter at his desk, writing:

“See me later if you don’t mind—I’m writing a letter to Khomeini.”

I was amused at the idea of the Southern Baptist writing to the
Moslem fanatic. What will he say to the man? I thought. Maybe
he’ll sign the letter “The Great Satan.” . ..

“If Khomeini is the religious leader he purports to be,” Carter
said, “I don’t see how he can condone the holding of our people.” 54

It was the beginning of the end of the Carter administration, too.
The seizure of the U.S. embassy created a sustained crisis that Presi¬
dent Carter could not extricate himself from—not by negotiations, not
by threats, not by a bungled military rescue mission. Although Teheran
engaged several times, often using dubious middlemen, in talks with
Washington, it was clear that Khomeini had an internal political
agenda that precluded the release of the hostages until he was ready.
“In January 1980,” says Harold Saunders, “a prominent Islamic states¬
man said: ‘You won’t get the hostages back until Khomeini puts in
place all the elements of his Islamic republic.’ ”

That proved to be the case.

The revolution in Iran changed everything. For Washington, it
eliminated a reliable ally, listening post, and base of operations. For the
other big player in the Cold War, the revolution in Iran was perhaps

Hell’s Ayatollah • 2.4 3

even more alarming. Despite the shah’s open alliance with the United
States, the Soviet Union had grown comfortable dealing with Iran on
terms that, more often than not, were marked by the kind of respect
that two neighboring powers give each other. In economic relations,
in particular, the USSR and Iran got along well. More important,
Iran’s stability meant that Moscow did not have to worry about insta¬
bility or irredentism on its flank in southwest Asia. Now, all bets were
off. For the first time since the 1920s, the Soviet Union started to
worry about Islam. And the United States was planning to make sure
it had something to worry about.

JIHAD I: THE “ARC OF ISLAM”

The revolution i n Iran collapsed the more important of the two
pillars holding up the American edifice in the Persian Gulf—the other
being Saudi Arabia—and sent Pentagon planners and Central Intelli¬
gence Agency analysts scrambling to calculate its impact on other
U.S. allies, on the region, and on the overall American presence in the
Middle East. From Saudi Arabia to Morocco, American experts franti¬
cally scanned the horizon to determine if, or when, the Khomeini phe¬
nomenon might replicate itself in other Middle East monarchies.

But along with the threat from Khomeinism, some U.S. policy mak¬
ers also saw opportunity.

The emergence of hard-core Islamic fundamentalism as a govern¬
ing force in Iran worried all of Iran’s neighbors—including its biggest,
the Soviet Union. The Khomeini regime was a volatile, unpredictable
new factor in the region, and some analysts believed that the Islamic
resurgence led by the Iranian ayatollah could inspire sympathies
inside the Soviet Union’s Muslim republics. That idea gave new impe¬
tus to long-held ideas about using the Islamic right to undermine the
Soviet Union in its own empire, deep in Central Asia. At the same
time, plans were under way to use Muslim Brotherhood-linked orga¬
nizations in neighboring Afghanistan to undermine the Soviet stake in

Jihad I: The "Arc of Islam” • 245

that country, which for decades was seen as part of Moscow’s sphere
of influence. The twin Islamic movements, in Iran and Afghanistan,
inspired Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security
adviser, and Bill Casey, President Reagan’s CIA director, to pursue the
Islam-in-Asia theme aggressively—most emphatically during the holy
war in Afghanistan.

The U.S. proxy war in Afghanistan, which cost $3 billion and sev¬
eral hundred thousand lives, took America’s decades-long alliance
with ultra-conservative political Islam to a new, more aggressive level.
Until Afghanistan, the dominant idea was Islam-as-bulwark, that is,
that political Islam was a barrier against Soviet expansion. But in
Afghanistan the paradigm was Islam-as-sword. The Islamic right
became an offensive weapon, signaling a significant escalation in the
policy of cooperating with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the
Saudi Arabia-led Islamic bloc, and other elements of political Islam.
Although the war in Afghanistan was sometimes portrayed as a
broad-based coalition effort, the mujahideen were overwhelmingly
Islamists, and two-thirds of the U.S. support for the mujahideen fight¬
ers in Afghanistan went to Islamic fundamentalist parties, channeled
through Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

The Afghan jihad also brought about a significant transformation
of the Islamist movement itself. First of all, the Afghan jihad empow¬
ered its most radical fringe, which took credit for battling toe to toe
with a superpower in Afghanistan. Second, the Afghan war created a
new cadre of Islamists skilled in guerrilla warfare, intelligence trade-
craft, assassination skills, and the making of car bombs. And third, it
vastly strengthened the international bonds that tied together
Islamists in North Africa, Egypt, the Gulf, Central Asia and Pakistan.
In one sense, the movement had already reached its takeoff point in
the 1970s, buoyed by the newfound power of Saudi Arabia’s oil
wealth, the emergence of the highly political Islamic banking system,
and the establishment of powerful new Islamist institutions in Egypt
and other conservative Muslim countries. But after Afghanistan, the
movement—radicalized, and feeling its power as never before—flexed
its muscle. In the late 1980s, Islamists seized control of Afghanistan
and Sudan, held significant power in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and

L46 • Devil’s Game

threatened to capture Egypt and Algeria. The foundation for A 1
Qaeda and its terrorist underground was laid in these years.

Some of this, perhaps most of it, was ignored by or invisible to
U.S. intelligence and policy makers, who were starry-eyed about the
prospect of dealing a body blow to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Not only that, but the more radical among U.S. officials saw Central
Asia as the soft Muslim “underbelly” of the Soviet Union, and pic¬
tured the disintegration of the USSR beginning in its Central Asian
republics.

Finally, in the broadest strategic terms, the Afghan jihad energized
what until the 1980s had been merely a neoconservative pipe dream:
the military occupation of the Persian Gulf and its oil fields. There is a
direct line between the war in Afghanistan and the current U.S. mili¬
tary presence deep into Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and other parts of
oil-rich Central Asia. It was a conflict that brought the United States
into a part of the world which, until the 1980s, lay outside the U.S.
sphere of influence. That began in the 1980s, when Afghan jihadists
took U.S., Chinese, Israeli, and other weapons to fight the Red Army.
It continued into the 1990s, when the United States cooperated with
the rise of the militant Taliban movement. It lasted on into the
present, when yet another Afghan war has facilitated a massive
U.S. entanglement in the newly independent Muslim Central Asian
republics. The United States has seamlessly linked its Middle East and
Persian Gulf empire, complete with an archipelago of military bases
in the Gulf, the Indian Ocean, and points west, with a new necklace of
bases encircling Iraq, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. If the conflicts of
the twenty-first century pit the United States against either Russia or
China, or both, in a struggle for control of the oil and gas resources
of southwest Asia, the United States already has the upper hand. For,
beginning with the Afghan jihad, the U.S. military began to assemble
a proto-occupation force for the Gulf and surrounding real estate.

None of this existed at the time of the Iranian revolution and the
start of the jihad in Afghanistan. But the war in that country allowed
the United States, for the first time, to begin to project U.S. military
forces directly into southwest Asia and the Gulf. It led to new military
relationships with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, the creation of

Jihad I: The “Arc of Islam” • 247

the Rapid Deployment Force and the U.S. Central Command, and the
establishment of new bases surrounding the region. The process began
just weeks after the Soviet Union moved troops into Afghanistan,
when, in January 1980, President Carter proclaimed what has come to
be called “the Carter Doctrine,” a forceful restatement of earlier U.S.
claims to the Persian Gulf that had been enunciated by Franklin
Delano Roosevelt (1943) and Dwight D. Eisenhower (1957). “Let our
position be absolutely clear,” said Carter. “An attempt by any outside
force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an
assault on the vital interests of the United States.” Aimed mostly at the
Soviet Union, Carter’s announcement was, for the most part, bravado.
In 1980, the United States did not have even token forces in the Gulf to
repel an attack by the USSR, and it lacked the ability to airlift and
sealift the U.S. military to the Gulf in an emergency. Of course, the
Soviet Union had no intention of invading or occupying the Gulf. Its
reluctant move into Afghanistan in 1979 was taken as a last-ditch
defensive action against a carefully calculated threat from Afghan
Islamist provocateurs backed by the United States and Pakistan. If
there existed any threat to U.S. interests in the Gulf, it was entirely
internal, but even in this arena U.S. capacities were suspect. Should
Iran or Iraq go to war against the Arab Gulf states or should a mili¬
tary coup in Saudi Arabia unseat the royal family, America’s ability to
react effectively was far from certain.

Long before the crisis in Afghanistan, there had been talk in the
United States about a U.S. invasion of Saudi Arabia and the occupa¬
tion of its oil fields. This began in the mid-1970s, after the Arab oil
embargo and fourfold increase in the price of oil imposed by the Orga¬
nization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in 1973-74. Strategic
thinking about a U.S. military move into the Gulf originated with Sec¬
retary of State Henry Kissinger. In 1975, an article headlined “Seizing
Arab Oil” appeared in Harper’s. The author, who used the pseudonym
Miles Ignotus, was identified by the magazine as “a Washington-based
professor and defense consultant with intimate links to high-level U.S.
policy makers.” Reputedly, the author was Edward Luttwak, a neo¬
conservative military analyst at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies (though Luttwak denies being its author). At

Z4 8 ♦ Devil’s Game

around the same time, another Hopkins professor, Robert W. Tucker,
wrote a similar piece for the American Jewish Committee’s Commen¬
tary magazine, and other articles advocating the seizure of the Saudi
oil fields began popping up elsewhere. According to James Akins,
the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the mid-1970s, the Harper’s
article outlined “how we could solve all of our economic and politi¬
cal problems by taking over the Arab oil fields [and] bringing in Tex¬
ans and Oklahomans to operate them,” says Akins, who took note
of the sudden epidemic of such articles: “I knew that it had to
have been the result of a deep background briefing. You don’t have
eight people coming up with the same screwy idea at the same time,
independently.” 1

Then Akins made what he calls his “fatal mistake,” and it eventu¬
ally got him fired as U.S. ambassador. “I said on television that any¬
one who would propose that is either a madman, a criminal, or an
agent of the Soviet Union.” Soon afterward, he learned that the back¬
ground briefing had been conducted by his boss, Henry Kissinger.
Akins was fired later that year. Kissinger has never acknowledged his
role in encouraging these articles. But in an interview with Business
Week that same year, he delivered a thinly veiled threat to the Saudis,
musing about bringing oil prices down through “massive political
warfare against countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran to make them
risk their political stability and maybe their security if they did not
cooperate.” Something of the flavor of Kissinger’s attitude toward
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states is also captured in a story told by a
former senior CIA official who served in the Persian Gulf in the
1970s. Determined to make a show of force in order to intimidate
Saudi Arabia, Kissinger summoned a CIA executive who was heading
out to the Middle East on an unrelated mission. “We have to teach
Saudi Arabia a lesson,” Kissinger told the CIA man. “Pick one of
those sheikhdoms, any of them, and overthrow the government there,
as a lesson to the Saudis.” According to the CIA official: “The idea
was to do it in Abu Dhabi or Dubai. But when my boss got out to the
Gulf, and met with all the CIA station chiefs from the region, not one
of them thought it was a good idea. So it was dropped. And Kissinger
never brought it up again.” 2

Jihad I: The “Arc of Islam” • 249

Until Afghanistan’s war, U.S. military planners knew that the
United States didn’t have the capability to rapidly dispatch tens or
hundreds of thousands of U.S. forces to the Gulf in the 1970s, and
America’s naval presence there was only a token force, despite the
bravado about occupying Arab oil fields. Along with announcing
the Carter Doctrine, President Carter took steps that began to give the
United States the ability to intervene directly into the Persian Gulf, if
only in rudimentary form. Carter ordered the creation of the Rapid
Deployment Force (RDF), an “over-the-horizon” military unit capa¬
ble of rushing at least several thousand U.S. troops to the Gulf in a cri¬
sis. Under President Ronald Reagan, the RDF would be expanded,
transforming itself into the Central Command, a brand-new U.S. mil¬
itary structure with authority for the Persian Gulf and the surround¬
ing region, from East Africa to Central Asia and Afghanistan. It was
the Central Command, or Centcom, that fought the first Persian Gulf
war, the 2001 war in Afghanistan, and the 2003 Iraq war.

But in 1979, a massive U.S. military presence in the Middle East,
the Gulf, and Central Asia was just a gleam in the eye of Zbigniew
Brzezinski. For the national security adviser, the solution to the
seething “arc of crisis” was the “arc of Islam.”

Eyeing Moscow’s Islamic “Underbelly”

The idea of mobilizing Islam against the USSR had a long history dur¬
ing the Cold War. For the most part, it was viewed skeptically by
mainstream U.S. strategists, especially during the 1950s and 1960s.
Working against the notion that Soviet Muslims might be induced or
encouraged to revolt against rule by Moscow was the fact that the
Soviets seemed to have succeeded in pacifying its Central Asian
republics, colonizing Russian settlers there, forcibly relocating Mus¬
lim ethnic populations, and suppressing Muslim religious movements.
In addition, it was a remote region, limiting United States access to
the population. But in the 1970s several factors combined to provide
stronger arguments to those who, for many years, had sought to play
the Islam card against Moscow. In 1970, a census taken in the Soviet

Devil’s Game

250 •

Union showed that the Muslim population of Soviet Central Asia was
growing far more rapidly than the populations of the other Soviet
republics, particularly the Russians. Then revolution in Iran cata¬
pulted militant Islam to the forefront of regional politics, in
Afghanistan and in Azerbaijan and other Soviet republics. And sud¬
denly, the Soviet-leaning regime in Kabul seemed vulnerable to a rag¬
tag coalition of Islamist forces, and Afghanistan itself emerged as a
potential battleground.

At least that’s how it looked to a small fraternity of U.S. officials
assembled by Brzezinski and the CIA. Within the Carter administra¬
tion the Nationalities Working Group was the organizational center of
this strategic planning. The NWG was a rump organization, an inter¬
agency task force created with the express approval of Brzezinski’s
NSC and including officials from the CIA, State Department, Penta¬
gon, and other agencies. The chairman of the NWG was Paul Henze,
a Brzezinski aide and a former CIA official, who worked with a close-
knit group of outside players and consultants who’d long believed
that restive Soviet minorities would be the undoing of the USSR.
Many of them had been associated since the 1950s with the creation
of Radio Liberty, a CIA-supported broadcasting system—parallel to
Radio Free Europe—that beamed propaganda into the Soviet bloc
during the Cold War.

Radio Liberty’s focus on Central Asia got off to a modest start in
the 1950s. According to James Critchlow, a longtime Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) executive and author of Nationalism
in Uzbekistan, Radio Liberty began its first broadcasts into Central
Asia through the Turkestan desk in Uzbek, Turkmen, Kazakh, Tajik,
and Kyrgyz, along with other broadcasts through its Caucasus desk in
Georgian, Azerbaijani, and Chechen. The broadcasts were limited to
half an hour a day in each language, and they contained a mix of news
and editorials. “Commentaries criticizing the Soviet regime, including
especially its repressive policies toward Islam and other religions,
were a major component,” says Critchlow. But, he says, in keeping
with the program’s modest goals in the 1950s, the broadcasts con¬
tained an explicit ban on secessionist agitation, a prohibition that was
“resented by some of the staff.” 3

Jihad I: The “Arc of Islam” • 2.5

From time to time, hard-line Cold Warriors would call for an inten¬
sification of the U.S. propaganda and even subversion aimed at the
Central Asian republics. For example, in 1958, Charles W. Hostler, a
former U.S. intelligence officer, wrote in the Middle East Journal that
“ the Soviets actively fear combined anti-Soviet action by the Turkish
peoples” in Asia, that NATO-linked Turkey could inspire these Mus¬
lims to “political independence from the Soviets,” and that “the West
must interest itself more in these peoples and their aspirations.” He
called for an expansion of U.S. radio broadcasts in Central Asian lan¬
guages and an expansion of U.S. government funding for “research in
the Central Asian and Caucasian peoples, areas, and languages.” 4

In the 1960s, Brzezinski himself joined the ranks of those calling
for stronger U.S. support for Central Asian Muslims. Gene Sosin, for¬
mer director of program planning for RFE/RL, noted:

Zbigniew Brzezinski was a consistent supporter of Radio Free
Europe and Radio Liberty. But he did not always agree with some
of our policies. This became evident in early 1966, when our CIA
sponsors asked him to join [in] a confidential analysis of both
radios.. . . Professors Brzezinski and [MIT’s William] Griffith crit¬
icized Radio Liberty’s nationality policy, which they felt was too
passive. They argued for adopting a more militant line in the non-
Russian broadcasts, which would stimulate anti-Russian antago¬
nism. 5

As a scion of a Polish elite family, Brzezinski was a militant anti¬
communist who saw the Soviet Union as a powerful but fragile
mosaic of seething ethnic and religious minorities. At the NSC, he
assembled a team of aides and consultants who wanted to exacerbate
conflicts inside the Soviet Union in order to hasten its fall. According
to Robert Gates, a senior CIA official who later became the CIA’s
director, the State Department was cautious about getting involved in
supporting dissident minorities in Soviet Central Asia. “Brzezinski, on
the other hand, was cfeeply interested in exploiting the Soviets’
nationalities problem,” wrote Gates, in his memoirs. “He wanted to
pursue covert action.” 6

The core of the Brzezinski-Henze NWG were acolytes of Alexandre

252 ■ Devil’s Game

Bennigsen, a count and European academic who was a prolific writer
and the guru of the school that viewed Islam as a powerful threat to
Soviet authority. Bennigsen’s family background gave him a natural
affinity for Brzezinski. He was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, the son
of a Russian count who fought on the side of the anti-Bolshevik
Whites in the civil war that followed the Russian revolution. In the
1950s Bennigsen established himself first at the Ecole des Hautes
Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and later at the University of
Chicago. His many books and articles on Islam in Central Asia fos¬
tered a movement of scholars and public officials who believed in the
viability of the Islamic card, and who took up residence at the Univer¬
sity of Chicago, the RAND Corporation, in think tanks, and in parts
of the national security bureaucracy. 7 Among those influenced by
Bennigsen were Brzezinski, Paul Henze, and S. Enders Wimbush, who
later served as a RAND Soviet specialist and as a Radio Liberty offi¬
cial in Munich.

From the late 1950s on, Bennigsen produced a steady stream of
books, articles, and research papers advancing the notion that an
underground movement of Islamists was gaining strength inside the
USSR. In The Islamic Threat to the Soviet State, Bennigsen said that
the movement harked back to “armed religious resistance [that]
began in the late eighteenth century ... spearheaded by mystical Sufi
brotherhoods ( tariqa ) fighting to establish the reign of God on earth”
and opposed to the Russian imperial presence. 8 Despite tremendous
Soviet efforts to fracture and suppress Islam, says Bennigsen, it
thrived. Even during the 1950s, when Nikita Khrushchev cracked
down on Islam, “far from destroying forever the religious feelings of
the Muslim population, it only gave a new impulse to the fundamen¬
talist, conservative trend represented by the ‘parallel,’ underground
Sufi Islam.” 9 Bennigsen claimed that these secret Sufi brotherhoods led
the resistance to the Soviet authority in broad swaths of Central Asia:

Since the victory of the Bolsheviks up to the present day, the only
serious, organized resistance encountered by the Soviets in the
Muslim territories has come from the Sufi tariqa, what Soviet
sources call the “parallel,” “nonofficial,” or “sectarian” Islam.
“Parallel Islam” is more powerful and more deeply rooted than

Jihad I: The “Arc of Islam ” • 253

official Islam. The Sufi brotherhoods are closed, but not wholly
secret, societies.. .. Soviet sources present Sufi brotherhoods
as “dangerous, fanatical, anti-Soviet, anti-Socialist, anti-Russian
reactionary forces,” but they recognize their efficiency and
dynamism. 10

According to Bennigsen, the most significant of the Sufi brotherhoods
was a secret society called the Naqshbandiya, a Freemason-style fra¬
ternity closely tied to the elite of Turkey, which had long-standing
connections in Central Asia. The Naqshbandiya were especially
strong in Chechnya, Dagestan, and parts of Central Asia, including
southern Uzbekistan. “The Naqshbandiya adepts have a long tradi¬
tion of ‘Holy War’ against the Russians,” wrote Bennigsen. His con¬
clusion was that nationalism in Central Asia was inextricably bound
up with radical political Islam:

Since [World War II] some orders have become more and more
infused with nationalism, with the result that any nationalist
movement—even progressive—which is bound to emerge will be
strongly influenced by the traditionalist conservative idea of
Sufism. That such a movement will emerge is beyond doubt. 11

Bennigsen, and others in his circle, urged a stronger U.S. effort to
encourage political Islam in the Soviet republics to revolt, even though,
as Bennigsen wrote, the most likely outcome would be “probably, a
conservative Islamic radicalism comparable to that of the present-day
‘Islamic Revolution’ in Iran.” 12 Bennigsen’s rather cavalier attitude
toward the emergence of radical-Islamist governments in Central Asia
precisely paralleled Brzezinski’s belief that the United States ought to
foster the spread of Islamism in Afghanistan without worrying about
the consequences.

“In the 1970s, Bennigsen and I taught a seminar on Soviet nation¬
ality affairs,” says Jeremy Azrael, author of Emergent Nationality
Problems in the USSR (1977). The University of Chicago program
produced a cohort of experts on Soviet Central Asia and Islam,
mostly followers of Bennigsen’s controversial theories, and some,
including Paul Goble, became noted CIA analysts on the topic. Azrael

254 • Devil’s Game

himself joined the CIA in 1978 as a guest analyst. “Once I was on
board there, I became a charter member of the Soviet Nationalities
Working Group.” During the Brzezinski era, efforts were at first
restricted to small gestures, such as the distribution of Korans in Cen¬
tral Asian languages and stepped-up efforts, in coordination with
Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, to contact Soviet Muslims visiting
Mecca for the hajj, according to Azrael. 13 But the revolution in Iran
stimulated the imagination of everyone involved.

“I brought Bennigsen to the CIA to give a lecture at the time of the
overthrow of the shah,” recalls Azrael. It was an exciting and challeng¬
ing moment. By toppling the shah, Khomeini had rewritten the rules of
what Islam might accomplish, and Cold War analysts in the United
States were alive with the possibilities. The neoconservatives, in particu¬
lar, along with other Cold War hard-liners, saw an opening for an anti-
Soviet jihad, not just in Afghanistan, but throughout the region. After
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, Zalmay
Khalilzad—a neoconservative analyst, RAND strategist, and future
U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan—wrote a paper in which he suggested
the problems that Khomeini’s regime had created for the USSR. “The
Khomeini regime also poses risks to the Soviets,” he wrote. “The
change of regime has encouraged similar movements in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and might even affect Soviet Muslim Central Asia.” 14 He
added:

The cost for the Soviet Union could include ... possible domestic
unrest in those regions of the USSR referred to by the Soviets as
their “internal colony”—the Islamic population of Soviet Central
Asia, which might reach 100 million by the year 2000—where
despite official attempts at assimilation, Islamic consciousness
forms a kind of counterculture and may be susceptible to Muslim
agitation if the Soviets continue to make war on their ethnic and
religious counterparts across the border.... Hostility to the Sovi¬
ets may increase generally in Muslim countries and groups. 15

It was, of course, straight out of Bennigsen.

Henze, the chairman of Brzezinski’s Nationalities Working Group,
was himself a longtime advocate of the Bennigsen view. Henze, whose

jihad I: The “Arc of Islam ” • 155

career included a stint as CIA station chief in Turkey in the mid-
1970s, held radical and offbeat views. He earned renown in the 1980s
as one of the leading advocates for the discredited notion that the
USSR and Bulgarian intelligence were behind the attempted assassina¬
tion of Pope John Paul II by a Turkish fascist. 16 As early as 1958,
Henze wrote an article on the Soviet Union’s “Shamil problem,” refer¬
ring to a nineteenth-century Muslim resistance leader who opposed
Russian expansion in Asia. Henze, like Bennigsen, was inspired by
Shamil and believed that eventually the collapse of the Soviet Union
could begin in Central Asia. In his 1958 article, Henze wrote:

It will be extremely difficult for Soviet Communists, however, to
continue their active pro-Arab “anti-colonial” policy for several
years without running the risk of provoking unrest among their
own Caucasian and Central Asian peoples. The Shamil debate
shows that an alert, proud, nationalistically inclined intelligentsia
has again developed among these peoples.. . . The Soviet Union is
not immune from Algerian situations of its own, though the day
when issues which are still in an incipient stage might reach such
proportions is still far off. 17

By the late 1970s, it no longer seemed so far off to Bennigsen,
Brzezinski, and Henze. They joined forces with Richard Pipes, another
advocate of the Islamic card, who had been writing about Central
Asian Muslims and the threat to the Soviet Union since the 1950s,
including a two-part analysis published in the Middle East Journal in
1955 entitled: “Muslims of Soviet Central Asia: Trends and
Prospects.” In it, Pipes wrote: “The entire area of Central Asia, includ¬
ing Chinese Turkestan with which Russian Central Asia has always
been closely connected, may well tend to move with time in the direc¬
tion of independent statehood. It is not inconceivable that this vast ter¬
ritory may some day be encompassed in a new Turkic, Muslim state
oriented toward the Middle East.” 18 Pipes, who once wrote that Soviet
Muslims would “explode into genocidal fury” against Moscow, 19 also
wrote extensively on the nationalities problem in Soviet Central Asia,
and when President Reagan replaced Carter in 1981, Pipes assumed
chairmanship of the Nationalities Working Group.

256 • Devil’s Game

Many other scholars and experts on the Soviet Union disagreed
with Bennigsen and his followers, and in any case no such anti-Soviet
Muslim revolt emerged. Radical political Islam was not a factor in the
dissolution of the USSR after perestroika, the collapse of the Berlin
Wall, and the establishment of Central Asia’s republics. The Central
Asian regimes that emerged in the 1990s were not tinged with
Islamism. Instead they found themselves battling militant Islamists
from A 1 Qaeda to the Islamic Liberation Party, and a case can be
made that, if anything, America’s support for political Islam in Asia
has aided the growth of a terrorist Islamist underground in Chechnya,
Uzbekistan, and other countries in the region.

The CIA in Afghanistan before 1979

In 1979, the theory that Islam might undermine the USSR in Asia
became practice. The United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia offi¬
cially launched the Islamist jihad that threatened the government in
Kabul, provoked the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan, and
spawned the ten-year civil war. The Afghan war, for Brzezinski, tied
two concepts together. The first was his idea of an “arc of Islam” in
southwest Asia, as a barrier against the USSR. As Fawaz Gerges,
author of America and Political Islam, wrote:

Containing Soviet Communism, said Brzezinski, dictated an
avoidance of anything that might split Islamic opposition to the
Soviets, especially a U.S.-Iranian military confrontation: “It now
seemed to me more important to forge an anti-Soviet Islamic
coalition.” As in the 1950s and 1960s, the United States hoped to
use Islam against radical, secular forces and their atheist ally, the
Soviet Union. Carter administration officials now recognized the
new possibilities for cooperation with Islamic resurgence and
hoped to harness its ideological and material resources against
Communist expansionism. Uppermost in U.S. officials’ minds
were the lessons of the 1950s and 1960s, when Islam was
employed as an ideological weapon in the fight against secular,
pan-Arab nationalism. 20

Jihad I: The “Arc Of Islam” • 157

The Bennigsen-Brzezinski notion of mobilizing Islam as a weapon
against Moscow’s Asian “underbelly” was the second salient of this
strategic plan.

Yet the Afghan Islamists didn’t emerge fully developed, out of
nowhere, when they began receiving official CIA support. Long
before 1979, the Islamic right had emerged as a potent force inside
Afghanistan, where, from the 1950s on, it did battle with progressive,
left, and secular forces in Kabul. America’s connection to the Muslim
Brotherhood-linked Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan began at
least as early as the 1950s, and U.S. support for the Islamic right’s
political movement in the country began as far back as 1973.

Although the CIA did not have a great presence in Afghanistan in
the early decades of the Cold War, it did dispatch a team there through
the offices of the Asia Foundation, a CIA front organization. During
the 1950s and 1960s, the Asia Foundation provided significant support
to Kabul University and had several modest projects that dealt with
Afghanistan’s organized Muslim community. According to John and
Rose Bannigan, longtime Asia Foundation officials who worked for the
foundation in both Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1960s, the organi¬
zation helped the Islamic Research Institute in Lahore, Pakistan, to
publish the Urdu Encyclopedia of Islam. “We were also involved with
the major universities, through the departments of Islamic theology,”
John Bannigan says. In both Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Bannigans
worked with student groups to combat pro-Soviet student organiza¬
tions. “The students were target number one,” he says. In Afghanistan,
according to Rose Bannigan, the Asia foundation established relations
with the Mujaddidi family, that country’s leading Islamic clerical fam¬
ily, and with the ministry of justice, which was headed for a time by a
Mujaddidi. The foundation also sent Shafiq Kamawi, the deputy minis¬
ter of justice, to Henry Kissinger’s seminar on international affairs at
Harvard, she says. “A lot of people in the ministry of justice were mul¬
lahs, including the legal adviser to the Asia Foundation.”

It is not clear to what extent the CIA maintained regular contacts
with Afghan Islamists in the 1960s, since Afghanistan was not a priority
for U.S. policy until well into the following decade. “When I was there
in 1957, Afghanistan was already a Soviet client state,” says a former

.58 • Devil’s Game

senior CIA official. “They wanted me to find out everything I could
about the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, because President Eisenhower
wanted a study of the importance of the country to U.S. strategy and its
relevance in Washington.” But the study proved only that Afghanistan
was not very important. “We concluded that there wasn’t any rele¬
vance,” he says. “Even if the Soviets took it over, there was no great risk
to the United States.” 21 Still, in the 1960s, the Asia Foundation main¬
tained a presence in Afghanistan, with two or three permanent U.S.
staffers and perhaps a dozen or more U.S. advisers and consultants. 22

During the 1960s, the Islamist movement in Afghanistan under¬
went a slow but steady politicization. Although Afghanistan society
had always been a conservative, traditional one in which Islam played a
central role, the version of Islam that prevailed in the country, at least
until the 1960s, was pious but not political. Islam in Afghanistan was a
faith and not a sociopolitical credo. But under the influence of outside
religious and intellectual forces—especially Egypt’s Muslim Brother¬
hood, Pakistan’s Islamic Group, and the international organization of
the Brotherhood based in Geneva and led by Said Ramadan—Afghan
Islam underwent a critical transformation, becoming politicized and
more militantly anti-communist. Leading Afghan Islamist organizers
and scholars began to return to Afghanistan from Egypt, where they
had come into contact with the heirs of Hassan al-Banna’s movement.
According to Olivier Roy, a leading French Orientalist and expert on
Afghanistan and Islam, the origin of political Islam in Afghanistan
began with a semi-secret clique called “the professors,” who came to
prominence in Afghanistan after studying at Cairo’s A 1 Azhar mosque,
where they hobnobbed with the Muslim Brotherhood. The movement
in Afghanistan coalesced in 1958, when a leading Afghan religious
scholar clashed with Muhammad Daoud, the king’s cousin and future
leader of the Afghan republic. Many Islamists were arrested, and the
nascent organization was forced to operate underground. It called
itself the Islamic Society. 23

By the mid-1960s, the Islamic Society and its offshoots were fol¬
lowing in the mode of Islamist organizations in Egypt, Pakistan, Iraq,
and elsewhere, physically assaulting left-wing and communist stu-

Jihad I: The “Arc of Islam " • 259

dents and threatening violence against their political opponents. Led
by many of the same men who would, in 1979, become the beneficiar¬
ies of the CIA’s largesse, they also began open political agitation.
Wrote Roy:

The “professors” greatly influenced their pupils and in 1965, the
year of the foundation of the communist party, the Islamist stu¬
dents demonstrated openly by distributing a leaflet entitled . . . the
“tract of the holy war.” The period from 1965 to 1972. was one of
political turmoil on the campus at Kabul. . . . They were very
much opposed to communism, and a great number of violent
fights broke out on Kabul campus between them and the Maoists.
Although at the beginning they were outnumbered by the commu¬
nists, the Islamists’ influence steadily increased and they gained a
majority in the student elections of 1970. 24

As early as June 1970, a confidential State Department dispatch
from the U.S. embassy in Kabul identified Afghanistan’s religious
leadership, in particular the clerical family of the Mujadiddis, as a
strong and active force. It concluded that agitation by the mullahs
“set back the leftist cause, at least in the countryside” and that “reli¬
gious conservatism, for the first time in many years, vividly demon¬
strated that it remains a force with which the government must
contend.” “The mullahs are reliably reported to have agreed to con¬
tinue the good fight in the provinces,” wrote the embassy’s political
officer. “Here, in Kabul, there have been some efforts to keep the
flame of religious fervor burning in the bazaar.” He added, with some
irony given future developments: “It will probably not be known for
some time how much staying power the clerical militancy has.” 25

Among the leaders of the Afghan Islamist movement in the early
1970s were Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, whose organization was affiliated
with the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi Arabia; Burhanuddin Rab-
bani; and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, all of whom led major components
of the jihad forces in the 1980s. According to Roy, “The movement
functioned on an open level, the Muslim Youth, and a more secret
level, centered upon the ‘professors.’ ” The leader of “the professors,”

z6o • Devil’s Game

and the man who led the semi-secret Organization of Muslim Youth,
was Professor Gholam Muhammad Niyazi of the faculty of theology
at Kabul University, a major beneficiary of CIA support through the
Asia Foundation. In 1972, Rabbani, Sayyaf, and later Hekmatyar
formed a guiding council for the movement, and Hekmatyar super¬
vised its secret military wing. The entire organization operated in
small cells of five members, and in the early 1970s—again, following
the pattern set by the Brotherhood in Egypt and Pakistan—they began
to infiltrate the armed forces. 26 In 1972, declassified U.S. embassy
documents reveal, a member of the Muslim Youth met a U.S. official
several times to request assistance, “describing in some detail the anti¬
communist activities of his group” (including the murder of “four
leftists”) and requesting covert U.S. aid to buy a printing press. But it
was too early for direct CIA help, and the embassy official turned
down the request, while expressing sympathy for the group’s goals. 27

Beginning about this time, the CIA began to take a more active role
on behalf of the Afghan Islamists. Previously, the CIA’s assistance was
modest, much of it funneled through the Asia Foundation to Kabul
University and more establishment Islamic forces. But then in 1973,
Prince Muhammad Daoud—with the assistance of the communists—
toppled the king and established an Afghan republic. Caught off
guard, bitterly divided into factions based on ego and ideology, the
Islamic right in Afghanistan nevertheless moved into open opposition
to Daoud. They soon found a plethora of friends abroad.

The CIA, Pakistan—first under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and then under
the Islamist General Zia ul-Haq—and the shah of Iran began urgent
efforts to undermine the new Afghan government. It was years before
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, long before the 1980s jihad, but
the momentum for an Islamist holy war in the landlocked Asian nation
was already gathering—with the full complicity of the CIA. Years later
a Pakistani government official working for Bhutto’s daughter, who
was then prime minister, admitted that the CIA’s support for the
Islamists in Afghanistan began immediately after Daoud’s 1973 coup.
“Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s Special Assistant Nasirullah Babar
reportedly stated in a press interview in April 1989 that the United

Jihad I: The “Arc of Islam ” • 2 .6

States had been financing Afghan dissidents since 1973 and that it had
taken [Islamic Party] chieftain Gulbuddin Hekmatyar ‘under its
umbrella’ months prior to Soviet military intervention,” according to
one account. 28

Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison, drawing heavily on recently
released Soviet archives, described in detail the effort by the United
States, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan to mobilize the Islamic right
inside Afghanistan:

It was in the early 1970s, with oil prices rising, that Shah
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran embarked on his ambitious
effort to roll back Soviet influence in neighboring countries and
create a modern version of the ancient Persian empire. . . . Begin¬
ning in 1974, the Shah launched a determined effort to draw
Kabul into a Western-tilted, Teheran-centered regional economic
and security sphere embracing India, Pakistan and the Persian
Gulf states. .. . The United States actively encouraged this roll¬
back policy as part of its broad partnership with the Shah in the
economic and security spheres as well as in covert action through¬
out southwest Asia. 29

The goal of the U.S.-Iranian effort, which was also supported by Saudi
Arabia and Pakistan, was to strengthen right-wing and conservative
forces in Daoud’s moderate government, in order to pull Afghanistan
out of the Soviet orbit. According to Cordovez and Harrison:

Savak and the CIA worked hand in hand, sometimes in loose col¬
laboration with underground Afghan Islamic fundamentalist
groups that shared their anti-Soviet objectives but had their own
agendas as well. The Afghan fundamentalists were closely linked, in
turn, to the Cairo-based Ikhwan al-Muslimeen (Muslim Brother¬
hood) and the Rabitat al Alam al Islami (Muslim World League), a
leading exponent of Saudi Wahhabi orthodoxy. As oil profits sky¬
rocketed, emissaries from these newly affluent Arab fundamentalist
groups arrived on the Afghan scene with bulging bankrolls. Like
Savak, they hired informers who attempted to identify Communist
sympathizers throughout the Afghan government and armed forces.

.6z • Devil’s Game

The authors added that Iran’s intelligence service fed weapons and
other assistance to underground groups in Afghanistan tied to the
Islamic right, while Pakistan’s Interservices Intelligence Directorate
(ISI) helped coordinate raids on Afghan targets. “Savak, the CIA, and
Pakistani agents were also involved in the abortive, fundamentalist-
backed coup attempts against Daoud in September and December
1973 and June 1974.” 30

In 1975, Afghan’s Islamists felt that they had enough power to
launch an all-out rebellion against Daoud, who, though wavering,
was still allied to Afghan’s communists. But the uprising was crushed,
many of the rebels were arrested and executed, and others—such as
Hekmatyar and Rabbani—fled into exile, mostly to Pakistan, where
they began to get significant support from the Pakistani military intel¬
ligence service. For the next four years, the ISI developed an increas¬
ingly close relationship to the motley coalition of Afghanistan rebels,
especially its Islamist core. A confidential State Department analysis
of the crisis in Afghanistan in 1975 specifically linked the Muslim
Brotherhood and ISI:

What went almost unnoticed in the excitement of alleged Pak¬
istani involvement was the fact that Daoud was putting down a
manifestation of “international” Islam. Afghan nationals who
were ringleaders in the insurgency, in addition to being persons
allegedly subverted by Pakistani aims, were reportedly members
of. . . the Muslim Brotherhood, and it was the Brotherhood as
part of a larger group that was said to have entered an agreement
with Pakistan’s chief of intelligence, General Jailani. 31

Inside Afghanistan, however, the vacillating Daoud began to tilt
right, under pressure from the United States, the shah of Iran, and Paki¬
stan. Between 1975 and 1978, Daoud switched sides, breaking deci¬
sively with his left-wing supporters and embracing the army and
Afghanistan’s conservative establishment. In 1976, Daoud met with
the shah and Prime Minister Bhutto, and in response he began to
install right-wing officers and other pro-Western leaders in key posts.
By 1978, Afghan government death squads started assassinating leftist

Jihad I: The “Arc of Islam” • 263

and communist leaders, and the communists and the left were purged
from the Kabul regime. Increasingly, Daoud’s power base was reduced
to a small, ultraconservative clique and the armed forces, and, accord¬
ing to Cordovez and Harrison, behind-the-scenes power was wielded
by SAVAK, the allies of Saudi Arabia’s Muslim World League, and the
Muslim Brotherhood. 32 The crisis raged until April 1978, when Nur
Mohammed Taraki, a communist, staged a pro-Soviet coup d’etat and
signed a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union. The Islamic right,
supported by the ISI, carried out a countrywide campaign of terrorism,
assassinating hundreds of teachers and civil servants in a Pol Pot-style
attack against secular and educated Afghanis.

The United States was well aware that the organizations in
Afghanistan carrying out anti-Soviet terrorism were affiliated with the
Muslim Brotherhood, according to numerous State Department and
embassy dispatches. One, from a CENTO meeting in 1978, says flatly
that the “main threat to new regime could come from tribes and such
groups as the Muslim Brotherhood.” 33 Another analysis noted in April
1979 that “some of the clerical opposition could eventually coalesce
around the Ikhwan-i Muslimin Muslim Brotherhood.” 34 In June 1979
in a lengthy document entitled “Current Status of the Insurrection in
Afghanistan,” an embassy officer noted that “entire provinces in the
central, eastern, and western portions of Afghanistan have slid under
rebel control.” It said that the rebels are “known by many names—such
as mujahideen (‘holy warriors’) [and] Ikhwan-i-Muslimin (‘Muslim
Brotherhood’).” It noted without comment that the Afghan government
referred to the opposition as “made-in-London mullahs.” 35

During this period, even as the 1978-79 revolution in Iran
unfolded, Pakistan’s ties to the Afghan Islamists grew stronger, and so
did Pakistan’s own Islamist leanings. General Zia instituted a regime
based on Islamic law and encouraged the growth of Pakistan’s Islamic
Group, led by Abul-Ala Mawdudi. As Ayatollah Khomeini was busily
creating his Islamic Republic of Iran, Zbigniew Brzezinski and the CIA
launched their Islamic-right army in Afghanistan. But it was more than
just an Afghanistan strategy. Brzezinski’s effort was designed to imple¬
ment the cataclysmic view of the Bennigsen school, to use the Islamic
right as a sword against the USSR itself.

264 • Devil’s Game

Zbig and Bill’s Muslim Army

In his oft-quoted 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur,
Zbigniew Brzezinski revealed a secret behind a secret, that the CIA’s
assistance to the mujahideen in Afghanistan began before, not after,
the Soviet invasion:

According to the official version of history [said Brzezinski), CIA
aid to the mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the
Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, on December Z4, 1979. But the
reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise:
Indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first
directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime
in Kabul. And that very day I wrote a note to the president in
which I explained to him in my opinion this aid was going to
induce a Soviet military intervention. 36

But behind that secret, of course, was yet another: that the United
States had been involved with the Islamic right in Afghanistan and the
Middle East throughout the 1970s. In addition, the Afghan holy war
began in earnest not in 1980, after Soviet troops crossed the border, and
not in 1979, when CIA aid officially began to flow, but in 1978, when
the Afghan Islamic right began a coordinated uprising with ISI support,
starting in northeast Afghanistan. In March 1979, the western half of
the country exploded, especially Herat, a major provincial capital in
the west, close to Iran. A hard-core Islamist organization, linked to
warlord Ismail Khan and supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran,
rose up and slaughtered numerous Afghan government officials. More
than a dozen Soviet advisers were hacked to death, along with their
wives and children. During this period, the United States main¬
tained relations with Iran’s military and intelligence apparatus and
with the new Iranian government of Prime Minister Bazargan, and
the CIA was providing Iran with intelligence about the USSR, Iraq,
and Afghanistan—a secret collaboration that continued until the
seizure of the U.S. embassy in Teheran by Khomeini’s agents in Decem¬
ber 1979.

Jihad l: The “Arc of Islam” • 265

In March 1979, the CIA completed its first formal proposal for direct
aid to the Afghan Islamists, coinciding with the revolt in Herat. Accord¬
ing to Gates, some in the CIA believed that Soviet involvement in
Afghanistan would “encourage a polarization of Muslim and Arab sen¬
timent against the USSR.” Not only that, but there was a practical side,
too: the CIA had surveyed Afghanistan as a possible site to replace the
listening posts that U.S. intelligence had in Iran until 1979, according to
Gates. 37 At the beginning of 1979, the United States began to consider
active, covert assistance to the jihadis, and both Pakistan and Saudi Ara¬
bia were asking the United States to get more involved. “In Saudi Ara¬
bia, a senior official... had raised the prospect of a Soviet setback in
Afghanistan and said that his government was considering officially
proposing that the United States aid the rebels.” 38 Even though some
U.S. analysts, including some CIA officials, believed that direct U.S. sup¬
port for the Afghan rebels could lead to a Soviet attack on Pakistan and
a worldwide showdown between the United States and the USSR, the
U.S. government went ahead. The CIA contacted Saudi Arabia and Pak¬
istan about providing aid to Afghan rebels and, as Brzezinski asserted, in
July 1979 President Carter signed the first presidential decision, or
“finding,” to have the CIA supply “nonlethal” aid, including communi¬
cations equipment, to the Islamic right in Afghanistan.

In the Nouvel Observateur interview, Brzezinski admitted that his
intention all along was to provoke a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—
even though, after the Soviet action occurred, U.S. officials expressed
shock and surprise. “We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we
knowingly increased the probability that they would,” said Brzezinski.
When he was asked if, in retrospect, he regretted supporting the rise of
Islamic fundamentalism and providing arms and training to future
terrorists, he answered:

What is more important to the history of the world? The Taliban

or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or

the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

“Now,” he told President Carter in 1979, “we can give the USSR its
Vietnam war.” 39

i66 • Devil’s Game

By the end of 1979, more than three-fourths of Afghanistan was in
open revolt. Just before Christmas, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan
to shore up the beleaguered Afghan government.

One of the quirks of the American jihad in Afghanistan was that
from the start the United States allowed Pakistan’s ISI and General
Zia to control the distribution of aid to the Afghan mujahideen.
“Zia,” wrote Steve Coll, a journalist whose book Ghost Wars is a
definitive account of the Afghan jihad, “sought and obtained political
control over the CIA’s weapons and money. He insisted that every gun
and every dollar allocated for the mujahideen pass through Pakistani
hands. He would decide which guerrillas benefited. . . . The CIA
accepted ISI’s approach with little dissent.” 40 Prince Turki al-Faisal,
then the head of the General Intelligence Department of Saudi Arabia,
visited Washington, met Brzezinski and the CIA, and agreed to match
U.S. contributions to the Afghan jihad dollar for dollar.

What unfolded, in the years after 1980, was an alliance between
Pakistan’s ISI, General Zia, and the Islamists in Pakistan, on the one
hand, and a nexus of Saudi Arabian government and private net¬
works, from Saudi intelligence to the Muslim World League to
Osama bin Laden, on the other. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan had been
close for years; this included close military ties, with Pakistani troops
and mercenaries being dispatched to help protect the Saudi royal fam¬
ily and train Saudi forces. “Pakistan’s relations with Saudi Arabia,
and with other Gulf Arab states, dated to the early 1960s,” wrote
Shireen Hunter. “Pakistani military officers, for example, had trained
the Saudi and Gulf militaries. One such officer was General Zia ul-
Haq.” 41 In addition, in the 1970s first Bhutto and then Zia depended
on Saudi aid, especially since the OPEC oil price increases of 1973-74
drained the Pakistan treasury of hard currency to pay for oil. The
Saudi aid came with political strings attached. The growth of
Islamism in Pakistan was directly tied to Saudi aid to Islamabad.

For the United States, the Saudi-Pakistani alliance was made to
order, since both countries were staunch U.S. allies that could be
counted on to join in a crusade against the USSR. The fact that both
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan had ulterior motives and their own
grand designs was ignored or overlooked by the Carter and Reagan

jihad l: The “Arc of Islam” • 167

administrations, who were eager to bloody the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan whatever the cost. Pakistan, always concerned with its
main foe, India, saw Afghanistan as strategic depth and an ally in the
subcontinent against New Delhi, and General Zia envisioned a kind
of “Greater Pakistan.” Saudi Arabia had its own interests, too, and
saw the conflict in Afghanistan as part of its broader competition with
Iran, whose Shiite fundamentalist regime was threatening Iraq and
the Gulf states. Saudi Arabia saw Afghanistan and Central Asia as a
flank in the struggle with Iran, and Riyadh wanted to strengthen the
orthodox Sunni Wahhabi forces in Afghanistan and beyond, to
weaken Iran.

Brzezinski, and then Casey, embraced the Pakistan-Saudi axis. But
both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia had their favored clients in Afghan¬
istan.

For Pakistan, it was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the militant Islamist
whose group was called the Islamic Party (Hizb-i Islami). Hekmatyar
had a well-earned reputation for being a brutal fanatic:

Gulbuddin was the darling of Zia and the Pakistan intelligence
service. Like other mujahideen leaders, he had been working with
the ISI since the early 1970s, when Pakistan had begun secretly
backing fundamentalist students at the University of Kabul who
were rebelling against Soviet influence in the Afghan government.
Back then Gulbuddin was very much a part of the emerging global
wave of Islamic radicalism. By all accounts, he was responsible for
the practice of throwing acid in the faces of Afghan women who
failed to cover themselves properly. 42

Hekmatyar’s specialty was skinning prisoners alive. 43 Sigbhatullah
Mujaddidi, an Islamist of somewhat less radical stripes, called
Hekmatyar a “true monster.” 44 But Representative Charles Wilson, a
Texas Republican who was the leading congressional advocate for the
Afghan jihad, approvingly noted that Zia was “totally committed to
Hekmatyar, because Zia saw the world as a conflict between Muslims
and Hindus, and he thought he could count on Hekmatyar to work
for a pan-Islamic entity that could stand up to India.” 45

Hekmatyar’s Islamic Party was one of the six to eight Afghan parties

i68 • Devil’s Game

that made up the anti-Soviet resistance. It was the largest, and it also
was reputed to have the fiercest fighters, which increased its appeal to
the CIA. “We didn’t think, at the beginning, that we would defeat the
Soviets,” says a CIA official who helped oversee the jihad. “But we did
want to kill as many Russians as we could, and Hekmatyar seemed like
the guy who could do that.” 46 His bone-chilling ruthlessness was a
plus. “The CIA officers in the Near East Division who were running the
Afghan program also embraced Hekmatyar as their most dependable
and effective ally,” according to Coll. “At least Hekmatyar knew who
the enemy was, the CIA’s officers reassured themselves.” 47 For those,
like Casey and Brzezinski, who envisioned Afghanistan as the key to
weakening the Soviet Union among its Muslim republics, Hekmatyar
had appeal, too, since he wanted to expand the war beyond
Afghanistan. Hekmatyar, according to Dilip Hiro, “talked of carrying
the guerrilla raids beyond the Oxus River into Soviet Central Asia and
rolling back communism by freeing the Muslim lands of Bukhara,
Tashkent, and Dushanbe.” 48

Saudi Arabia’s favored client was Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the Afghan
Muslim Brotherhood leader. As the war evolved, both Hekmatyar and
Sayyaf would emerge as the Afghan leaders closest to the legions of for¬
eign, mostly Arab, fighters who flocked to Afghanistan to join the
jihad. By the end of the 1980s, it would be these so-called Arab
Afghans who would graduate to become leaders of the militant and ter¬
rorist Islamists in Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and elsewhere—
including Chechnya and Uzbekistan. Hekmatyar and Sayyaf, though
not allies, were also close to Osama bin Laden, whose rise to promi¬
nence began as early as 1979-80, when he enlisted in the Afghan jihad.
“Once in Pakistani exile, [Hekmatyar] gathered around him the most
radical, anti-Western, transnational Islamists fighting in the jihad—
including bin Laden and other Arabs who arrived as volunteers.” 49

So the stage was set for a climactic showdown between the United
States and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. In the wake of the Iranian
revolution, the United States continued to pursue the chimera of an
Islamic bloc against the USSR, leading Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and
Egypt into battle in the remote mountains of Central Asia. Hundreds
of thousands of jihadis, electrified by the holy war, flocked to war

Jihad I: The “Arc of Islam” • 269

camps along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border from all over the
world. The United States had little comprehension of the forces that it
was unleashing. But that did not prevent the Reagan administration
from pushing the war in Afghanistan into the Soviet Union itself and
trying to enlist even Khomeini’s Iran in the jihad.

JIHAD II: INTO CENTRAL ASIA

When the American-sponsored jihad in Afghanistan began
in 1979, it took place during a critical transformation in the history of
political Islam.

From 1945 until 1979, the Islamic right seemed firmly attached to
the Western, and anti-communist, camp in the Cold War. During this
period, it was understandable for many analysts to have seen political
Islam as docile and, if not pro-American, then at least sympathetic to
American political and economic goals in the region. In the Afghan
mountains, fierce mullahs expressed their hatred of communism; in
the Saudi desert, the Wahhabi establishment thundered against leftist
and nationalist forces in North Africa, the Middle East, and Pakistan;
and on campuses from Kabul and Islamabad to Baghdad and Cairo,
the Muslim Brotherhood battled secularists and preached against
Marxism.

Starting in 1979, however, things changed. Ayatollah Khomeini’s
revolution in Iran was a frontal challenge to U.S. interests. Moreover,
the Islamic right had begun to spawn deadly terrorist offshoots that
attacked U.S. interests and pro-Western leaders, from the Grand
Mosque in Mecca to Anwar Sadat to Hezbollah’s predatory terror in
Lebanon. The United States was exceedingly slow to grasp the lessons

Jihad II: Into Central Asia • 27

of these developments. First, it failed to concentrate resources on
Islamist terrorism after 1979, despite pleas from Arab leaders like
Egypt’s President Mubarak to do so. More important, the United
States failed to understand the larger lesson: that the Islamic right was
not just anti-communist, but fundamentally opposed to the West and
to its most reliable long-term partners in the Middle East, namely, the
secular, democratic nationalists.

Despite the mounting evidence that the Islamic right was a devil¬
ishly dangerous ally, the Reagan administration joined their jihad.

The scope of the U.S.-Islamist alliance then is hard to imagine now,
in the midst of what the Bush administration calls a global war on ter¬
rorism against A 1 Qaeda and its ilk. But, just as in 1953, when Said
Ramadan of the Muslim Brotherhood was ushered into the Oval
Office to see President Eisenhower, in 1981 Reagan’s tough-minded—
and often neoconservative—national security officials and intelligence
professionals pursued the Afghan jihad with a vengeance. In fact,
the same neoconservatives who today lead the charge for a “clash of
civilizations”-style war on terror then pressed the hardest for an alli¬
ance with the Afghan Islamists and, at the same time, repeatedly
reached out for a deal with the ayatollahs in Teheran.

The U.S.-Islamist alliance of the 1980s was undertaken with all
deliberateness. From 1979 to 1982, the Carter and Reagan adminis¬
trations considered the existence of a threat from right-wing Islam,
and decided to ignore it.

Following the Iranian revolution, Carter administration officials
convened a government-wide meeting to analyze political Islam. It
included State Department experts, intelligence analysts, and ambas¬
sadors from the Middle East. “There was a big analytical effort,” says
Harold Saunders, who was assistant secretary of state for Near East
affairs, and it centered on the conservative Arab states and monar¬
chies. “The main focus was to gain an understanding of whether it
could happen in Jordan, in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia, or perhaps this
was sui generis to Iran.” According to Saunders, and to other U.S.
officials and intelligence officers, the conclusion of this reevaluation
was that political Islam was not threatening. “We realized there
would be a ratcheting up of political Islam,” says Saunders. “The

2.72. • Devil’s Game

question was, could the existing governments deal with it? I pushed
pretty hard on Saudi Arabia, and I couldn’t get anyone to say that
Saudi Arabia would fall. In Egypt, at the time, we thought Sadat
could handle it.” 1

Certainly, no effort was made to discourage Saudi Arabia from
pursuing its long-held notion of a foreign policy based on right-wing
Islamism. No effort was made to discourage Sadat from cozying up to
the Muslim Brotherhood. No effort was made to discourage Israel
and Jordan from supporting the Muslim Brotherhood’s campaign of
terrorism against Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization.
And, of course, in Pakistan the United States jumped into bed with
General Zia ul-Haq, whose Muslim Brotherhood-linked regime and
ISI intelligence service were organizing the Afghan jihad.

In the end, the Islamist movement was seen as a force that could be
contained by existing governments. No real effort was made to under¬
stand how those governments might be changed, how it might affect
the societies these governments presided over, and how the Islamists
were organized across international borders. Policy makers continued
to believe that Islamism was too diverse to be looked at globally, and
insisted it could be dealt with on a country-by-country basis. “We
concluded that we couldn’t have a policy toward political Islam,”
recalls Saunders. 2

In the wake of the Iranian revolution there was a brief flurry of
directives from Washington to CIA stations overseas to provide an
evaluation of Iran’s impact. Intelligence analysts at the CIA and the
State Department took a look at countries that might be threatened
with Khomeini-style revolution, and concluded that the internal
threat seemed minimal. As long as existing, pro-U.S. regimes were not
at risk, almost no U.S. officials raised alarm about the growing
strength of political Islam, its effects within countries plagued by it, or
the eventual possibility that radical Islamists might turn against the
United States. “At first, there was the assumption that it was going to
spread, that it was going to happen in Morocco, Jordan, and Saudi
Arabia, that the monarchies were an anachronism,” says a former
CIA station chief in Morocco. “I got to Morocco and found nothing
like that. There was a very small Islamist movement.” In the CIA’s

]ihad II: Into Central Asia • 2.73

field manual for Morocco, there were eight pages on Islam and poli¬
tics, he says. “I’d tell my case officers: Know it cold. And when they
were talking to an Islamist, I told them to say: ‘I don’t understand this
or that.’ And then listen.” 3 The conclusion reached in Morocco, as for
other states, was that there was nothing to worry about.

At the CIA, Martha Kessler was one of the few analysts who con¬
sistently paid attention to political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood.
In the field, she says, many CIA operatives missed it, because the most
militant Islamists were organizing under the radar. “We had a World
War II-era system of just plopping our officials down in capital cities,
and the Islamist movement wasn’t happening in those cities, it was
happening out in the country and in small towns.” In her opinion, it
was taking on a decidedly anti-American character. She wrote an
analysis at the time warning that when governments such as Egypt,
Sudan, and Pakistan begin to play ball with Islamists, it would have
profound consequences. “I said that when governments in the region
started making efforts to co-opt the Islamists, it would change the
character of those governments,” she says. “I was of the school that it
would be largely anti-Western in tone.” 4 Needless to say, Kessler’s
analysis did not dissuade policy makers from the Afghan jihad.

The same view prevailed among U.S. government counterterror¬
ism professionals. “After the Sadat assassination, I was in the coun¬
terterrorism center,” says Robert Baer, a former CIA operative. “I
came across some documents, some trial transcripts for [the assassins
of Sadat], and I started asking, Who are these people? What’s their
agenda? What’s the connection? I started looking for documents on
the Muslim Brotherhood.” But, he says, “It just wasn’t in our con¬
sciousness to go after these people.” 5

Sadat, who had used the Muslim Brotherhood and the financial
resources of its Islamic banking network to strengthen his grip on
power after becoming president of Egypt in 1970, was least of all
aware of how dangerous the Islamic right might be. Within days of
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Sadat enthusiastically joined the
United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan in sending jihadists to
Peshawar, and war.

So the jihad in Afghanistan expanded into a full-scale war. And the

274 ’ Devil’s Game

Reagan team, preoccupied with the Cold War, struck a deal with
Iran’s ayatollahs in 1980, winked as Israel armed Iran from 1980 to
1987, gave Khomeini’s regime secret intelligence about the Iranian
left, and finally, in the Iran-contra affair, actually sold U.S. arms to
Iran in search of mythical Islamist “moderates.”

The Arab Afghans

The war in Afghanistan was fought, for the most part, by the
mujahideen of the fractious coalition backed by Pakistan and made up
mostly of guerrillas associated with one of four fundamentalist organi¬
zations. “In Afghanistan,” says a former CIA official who ran the
covert operation, “there were about 300,000 fighters, all of whom,
with the exception of about 15,000 moderates, were Islamists.” 6 The
vast majority were Afghans, but some were jihadists drawn to the
fighting from other parts of the world, especially from Egypt, Jordan,
Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf. These would be the raw material for
Osama bin Laden and the fledgling A 1 Qaeda organization that grew
out of the jihad. The so-called Arab Afghans included bin Laden him¬
self, Ayman al-Zawahiri of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad, A 1 Qaeda’s second-
in-command, and tens of thousands of jihadists from the Arab states,
Indonesia, the Philippines, Chechnya, and other far-flung corners of
the Muslim world.

They were the guerrillas who, after the war was over, went home
to Algeria, to Egypt, to Lebanon, to Saudi Arabia, and to Central Asia
to continue the jihad. Many, of course, learned terrorism skills—
assassination, sabotage, car bombs—at the hands of the United States
and its allies.

In January 1980, Brzezinski visited Egypt to mobilize Arab sup¬
port for the jihad. Within weeks of his visit, Sadat authorized Egypt’s
full participation, giving permission for the U.S. Air Force to use
Egypt as a base, supplying stockpiles of Egyptian arms to the rebels,
and recruiting, training, and arming Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood
activists for battle. “Sadat and his government became, for a time, vir¬
tual recruiting sergeants and quartermasters to the secret army of

]ihad II: Into Central Asia • 27 5

zealots being mustered to fight the Soviets in South and Central Asia.” 7
U.S. cargo planes took off from Qena and Aswan in Egypt, ferrying
supplies to the jihad bases in Pakistan, and, according to John Cooley,
“Egypt’s military inventories were being scoured for Soviet-supplied
arms to send to the jihad. An old arms factory near Helwan, Egypt, was
eventually converted to supply the same kind of weapons.” 8

Egypt—and other Arab countries—supplied more than weapons.
A number of countries in the Muslim world decided it would be pru¬
dent to send Islamist militants to the Afghan war, perhaps thinking
that they were killing two birds with one stone: they were pleasing the
United States, which was looking for recruits, and they were getting
rid of some troublemakers. Sadat, like other leaders, perhaps felt that
most of them would be killed during the jihad. “Muslim governments
emptied their prisons and sent these bad boys over there,” says a CIA
official who spent several years as station chief in Pakistan during the
jihad. 9 Not only were they packaged and shipped to Afghanistan, but
they received expert training from U.S. Special Forces. “By the end of
1980,” wrote Cooley, “U.S. military trainers were sent to Egypt to
impart the skills of the U.S. Special Forces to those Egyptians who
would, in turn, pass on the training to the Egyptian volunteers flying
to the aid of the mujahideen in Afghanistan.” 10

The British, for whom Afghanistan was the playground for the
Great Game of the nineteenth century and who had long-standing
colonial ties to Pakistan, had an extensive history of dealing with the
tribes and religious leaders of the Pakistan-Afghanistan area. Gus
Avrakotos, a CIA official closely involved with the jihad for years,
reported that the British “have guys who have lived over there for
twenty years as journalists or authors or tobacco growers, [and] when
the Soviets invaded, MI6 activated these old networks.” Added
Avrakotos:

The Brits were able to buy things that we couldn’t, because it
infringed on murder, assassination and indiscriminate bombings.
They could issue guns with silencers. We couldn’t do that because
a silencer immediately implied assassination—and heaven forbid
car bombs! No way I could even suggest it, but I could say to the

zy 6 • Devil’s G

Brits, “Fadlallah [the radical Shiite leader] in Beirut was really
effective last week. They had a car bomb that killed 300 people.” 1
gave MI6 stuff in good faith. What they did with it was always
their business. 11

Much of this training in assassination, car bombs, and the like
found its way to the Arab volunteers who eventually became AI
Qaeda’s foot soldiers. Some mujahideen were even trained to organize
the low-tech, Afghan version of car bombs. “Under ISI direction, the
mujahideen received training and malleable explosives to mount car
bomb and even camel bomb attacks in Soviet-occupied cities, usually
designed to kill Soviet soldiers and commanders,” wrote Steve Coll.
“[CIA Director] Casey endorsed these techniques despite the qualms
of some CIA career officers.” 12 And it was not just Soviet soldiers who
were blown up by such devices. In at least one instance, the
mujahideen carried out an extension of the battles that raged at Kabul
University during the 1960s and 1970s, when a briefcase bomb
exploded under a university dining room table. 13 “This is a rough busi¬
ness,” said the CIA’s Bill Casey. “If we’re afraid to hit the terrorists
because somebody’s going to yell ‘assassination,’ it’ll never stop.” 14
Soon, the CIA and ISI were providing stealthlike explosive devices to
the mujahideen, including bombs disguised as pens, watches, cigarette
lighters, and tape recorders. 15 “Do I want to order bicycle bombs to
park in front of an officers’ headquarters?” asked Avrakotos. “Yes.
That’s what spreads fear.” 16 Among the targets of mujahideen bombs
were soft targets such as Kabul cinemas and cultural shows.

Although the Afghan mujahideen rebelled at the idea of suicide
bombs, Arab volunteers did not:

It was only the Arab volunteers—from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Alge¬
ria, and other countries, who had been raised in an entirely differ¬
ent culture, spoke their own language, and preached their own
interpretations of Islam while fighting far from their homes and
families—who later advocated suicide attacks. Afghan jihadists,
tightly woven into family, clan, and regional social networks, never
embraced suicide tactics in significant numbers. 17

Jihad II: Into Central Asia • 2.77

Afghan mujahideen were also trained inside the United States,
beginning in 1980 under Brzezinski’s oversight, at various U.S. facili¬
ties on the East Coast, by Green Berets and U.S. Navy SEALs. “The
deadly secrets which trainers of the Afghan holy warriors passed on
numbered over sixty. They included the use of sophisticated fuses,
timers and explosives, automatic weapons with armor-piercing
ammunition, remote-control devices for triggering mines and bombs
(later used in the volunteers’ home countries and against the Israelis)
[and] strategic sabotage, demolition, and arson.” 18

The Afghan war unfolded in several phases. It started slowly, and
over the first five years the U.S. objective was not to win the war, not
to defeat the Soviet Union and force its withdrawal, but simply to
bleed the USSR, embarrass it, and win propaganda points. In 1984,
however, prodded by Rep. Charlie Wilson and with Casey’s enthusi¬
astic support, CIA funding of the war—and Saudi Arabia’s matching
grants—rose rapidly. Funding for the jihad in 1984 totaled $250 mil¬
lion, “as much as all the previous years combined.” 19 And it con¬
tinued to skyrocket: $470 million in 1986, $630 million in 1987.
The United States also worked hard to bring other countries into the
war, including China. According to Charles Freeman, who served as
U.S. ambassador to China, “From 1981 to 1984, there was about
$600 million from Beijing in arms for Afghanistan,” says Freeman. 20
Not only did Casey expand the funding for the war, but he grew more
ambitious in his goals. Now seeking victory, he sought to provide
more sophisticated weaponry to the mujahideen, including the Stinger
ground-to-air missiles that allegedly had a decisive impact on the mil¬
itary dimension of the conflict. 21

As the jihad expanded in both goals and scope, more and more
Arabs and other foreigners were drawn in. Various Arab governments,
including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, international organizations tied to
the Islamic right—such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim
World Teague, the International Islamic Relief Organization, and the
Tablighi Jamaat, a Pakistan-based Islamic missionary organization—
ran campaigns to recruit jihadis. It was Osama bin Faden’s dream
come true: Muslim fundamentalist groups mobilizing worldwide to

Z7 » • Devil’s Game

find militant fighters, bring them to Pakistan, and then smuggle them
into Afghanistan for a jihad. “Many were offered trips to Pakistan for
religious studies,” wrote Cooley:

Usually, during about six weeks’ religious studies, the new adepts
were not offered military training immediately, or even briefed
about the jihad against the Russian and Communist “enemies of
God.” This came at the end of the six-week period. ISI officers,
usually in mufti, would then appear and offer opportunities for
training. [Training was provided forj thousands of Algerians,
Egyptians, Sudanese, Saudis, and others . 22

According to Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist and author of Tal¬
iban, between 1982 and 1992 35,000 radical Islamists from forty-
three countries fought alongside the mujahideen in the war and its
aftermath, and tens of thousands of additional jihadis trained in the
madrassas that General Zia created along the Pakistan-Afghanistan
border. “Eventually more than 100,000 Muslim radicals were to have
direct contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan and be influenced by the
jihad.” 23

Some of the recruiting for the mujahideen took place inside the
United States, in Arab and Muslim communities. At the A 1 Kifah
Afghan Refugee Center in Brooklyn, many Arabs signed up for the
jihad. “There were hard-to-trace suitcases full of cash and anonymous
bearer cheques or bank drafts, from the Muslim World League, the
Tablighi Jamaat, and other missionary and charitable organizations
located in Pakistan.” 24 One of the key individuals involved in the U.S.
recruiting effort in the mid-1980s was Abdullah Azzam, a radical
Palestinian Islamist who was bin Laden’s professor and who would be
the co-founder of the predecessor organization to A 1 Qaeda, the Ser¬
vices Bureau, which was established by bin Laden and Azzam in
Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1984. The innocently named Services Bureau
played the central role in moving Arab and foreign jihadis into the war.

Azzam, born in Jenin, Palestine, in 1941, joined the Muslim Broth¬
erhood as a Palestinian youth in Syria, where he studied Islamic law
in the early 1960s, when the Brotherhood was leading the anti-
Nasser movement in the Arab world. 25 Although he initially belonged

Jihad II: Into Central Asia • 279

to the Palestine Liberation Organization, he split with the PLO during
the showdown with King Hussein in Black September, 1970, when the
Brotherhood backed the monarchy. He spent time at the A 1 Azhar
mosque in Cairo, during the time that Anwar Sadat was bringing the
Muslim Brotherhood back to Egypt, and ended up as a teacher of
Islamic law at King Abdel Aziz University in Saudi Arabia, where bin
Laden was his student. The Muslim World League hired Azzam to
head its education section, and in 1980 he first traveled to Pakistan. In
1984, in addition to founding the Services Bureau, Azzam established
Al Jihad magazine and wrote prolifically on the duties of Muslims.
Providing an early road map to his plan for a global jihad, Azzam
wrote the oft-quoted call to arms: “Jihad will remain an individual
obligation until all other lands which formerly were Muslim come
back to us and Islam reigns within them once again. Before us lie
Palestine, Bukhara, Lebanon, Chad, Eritrea, Somalia, the Philippines,
Burma, South Yemen, Tashkent, Andalusia.” 26 To sweeten the pot,
Azzam told potential jihad recruits that Osama bin Laden would pay
$300 a month to Arabs who wanted to fight in Afghanistan.

Mike Scheuer is the CIA official who, in later years, would be in
charge of U.S. efforts to hunt down Osama bin Laden. In 2002, under
the name “Anonymous,” he wrote Through Our Enemies' Eyes, a
detailed account of the rise of bin Laden and Al Qaeda. In it, he
described the role of the Services Bureau, also known by its Arabic
acronym MAK:

Bin Laden got in on the ground floor of the development of
Islamic NGOs for military-support activities when he joined with
Shaykh Abdullah Azzam to found the Makhtab al-Khidimat
(MAK)—or Service Bureau—in Peshawar in the mid-1980s.
While the MAK provided relief to Afghan war victims, it also
received, organized, and moved into Afghanistan the volunteers,
arms, and money flowing to the mujahideen from the Muslim
world. In the financiaj realm, Al-Watan al-Arabi has said that
between 1979 and 1989 about $600 million was sent to bin
Laden’s organization through charitable institutions in the Gulf,
especially those in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, the UAE,
Bahrain, and Qatar. 27

2.80 * D E

l ’ s Game

According to Scheuer, bin Laden and Azzam were well connected to a
host of other Islamic-right charities, including IIRO and the Muslim
World League. According to CIA officials involved with the jihad, the
CIA did not directly engage with Azzam and bin Laden in recruiting
Arab volunteers, although the CIA did not oppose the effort. Robert
Gates, then the CIA director, revealed that “the CIA examined ways
to increase their participation.” Although no action was taken, noth¬
ing was done to discourage the “Arab Afghans,” either. 28

As the CIA began to figure out long after the Afghan jihad was his¬
tory, the joint U.S.-Saudi funding for the war was not the only source
of cash for the mujahideen, as the $600 million that Scheuer refers to
indicates. Private and semi-private donations from the Muslim Broth¬
erhood and its apparatus poured into the jihad, and none of it was
subject to even the minimal oversight that Pakistan’s ISI provided
over the distribution of the U.S. and Saudi largesse. According to
Afghanistan: The Bear Trap, a riveting account of the jihad penned by
a former Pakistani intelligence officer, Mohammad Yousaf, a parallel
war supply system developed outside official channels, complete with
freelancers and wheeler-dealers, and a significant part of it was funded
with private Arab donations. “It was largely Arab money that saved
the system,” wrote Yousaf. “By this I mean cash from rich individuals
or private organizations in the Arab world, not Saudi government
funds. Without these extra millions the flow of arms actually getting to
the Mujahideen would have been cut to a trickle. The problem is it all
went to the four Fundamentalist parties, not the Moderates.” 29

In particular, Yousaf wrote, a lot of the cash went to Abdul Rasul
Sayyaf, the chief Muslim Brotherhood activist in Afghanistan and one
of the Islamist “professors” who helped to organize the secret society
that emerged in the 1960s and early 1970s. It was Sayyaf, along with
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—the fanatical mujahideen leader whose
Islamic Party was the largest and fiercest of the organizations in the
jihad—who were closest to Osama bin Laden.

Sayyaf, Hekmatyar, and other fundamentalists got the lion’s share
of the Arab money because a large part of it was transferred to the
mujahideen through the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamic Group

Jihad II: Into Central Asia • 281

of Pakistan, the Islamist political party that was created by Abul-Ala
Mawdudi. 30 The Islamic Group (Jamaat-e Islami), founded in 1940,
had spent much of the 1950s and 1960s battling Pakistan’s left and
secularists. In the 1970s, the Islamic Group became more powerful as
it absorbed surplus petrodollars funneled its way by the Gulf Arabs,
and it helped push Pakistan to the right in the 1970s, under Prime
Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and General Zia ul-Haq. “The Muslim
Brotherhood was spreading its money around,” says Selig Harrison,
an expert on south Asia and the co-author of Out of Afghanistan.
According to Harrison, the head of the Islamic Group was related to
Zia, and he worked closely with them and helped them, and many of
the key players in the ISI and the military were members of the Islamic
Group. Through the Muslim World League and other Muslim Broth¬
erhood elements in the Gulf, money had started to flow to the coffers
of the mujahideen even before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,
says Harrison. “It was all done through Pakistan, with the help of
Rabitat [the League], and the Jamaat-e Islami was getting rich, too.” 31

At the time, virtually no one sensed the importance of bin Laden
and Azzam, and the non-Afghan jihad volunteers seemed like a minor
part in the mobilization of several hundred thousand Afghan
mujahideen. The CIA was so fixated on its Cold War jihad that it never
stopped to consider the consequences of empowering a worldwide
Islamist armed force. And, in the meantime, Bill Casey was busy open¬
ing a second front, pushing hard to expand the Afghanistan war into
Central Asia—with resources that Zbigniew Brzezinski and Alexandre
Bennigsen could never have dreamed of just a few years earlier.

Across the Amu River

In carrying the Afghan jihad into the Soviet Union itself, Casey exhib¬
ited both a messianic, religiously inspired version of anti-communism
and a high-stakes, high : risk approach to foreign policy. Within the
Reagan administration, there were at least two competing schools of
thought: The first, hewing to the traditional rules of U.S. diplomacy,

.8z • Devil’s Game

saw the Soviet Union as a mighty competitor that needed to be chal¬
lenged worldwide, in order to prevent Soviet gains; and the second,
which included the neoconservatives and Casey, advocated a policy of
rolling back the Soviet Union in the Third World, eastern Europe, and
Central Asia. “The real split in the Reagan administration was not
between liberals and conservatives,” says Herb Meyer, who served as
Casey’s chief of staff at the CIA in the 1980s. “The real split was
between those who wished not to lose the Cold War and those who
wished to win it.” 32 Casey was in the latter camp, and for him
Afghanistan was the key.

In order to win the Cold War, Casey believed, it would take a
strong working alliance among the countries of Brzezinski’s “arc of
Islam”—including Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia—and Casey
paid special attention to Saudi Arabia as the linchpin of the effort.
The CIA director saw Saudi Arabia as more than a financial resource
to support the jihad, and as more than the center of ultra-orthodox
Islam. According to Meyer, Casey also mobilized Saudi Arabia’s oil
weapon against the USSR in the 1980s. “The Saudis were very helpful
to us in winning the Cold War,” says Meyer. Because the Soviet Union
was so dependent on oil exports to earn hard currency, Casey asked
Saudi Arabia to ramp up its oil output and collapse the price of oil.
“Bill played a key role in working with the Saudis to get the price of
oil down,” says Meyer. “They hated the Soviets.” Saudi Arabia
expanded production, the price of oil dropped to historic lows, falling
from $28 per barrel to $10 per barrel in a matter of weeks, and Soviet
income was severely curtailed. “It was a body blow to the Soviets. It
was the equivalent of stepping on their oxygen tube.” 33

Casey, a devout Catholic, combined a fierce belief in the power
and importance of religion with a Machiavellian attitude toward the
political utility of religious belief. “He was a deeply religious man,
and he had a good working relationship with the pope,” says Meyer.
“Casey,” wrote Coll, in Ghost Wars, “saw political Islam and the
Catholic Church as natural allies in the ‘realistic counter-strategy’ of
covert action he was forging at the CIA to thwart Soviet impe¬
rialism.” 34 In this view, Casey was encouraged by his chief intelligence

Jihad II: Into Central Asia • 283

adviser on the Middle East, Robert Ames, who was the CIA’s leading
regional expert. In a speech, Casey credited Ames with having empha¬
sized to him the importance of efforts by the Soviet Union and its
allies in the Muslim world to extirpate organized religion, because of
the threat that it supposedly posed to communist or nationalist party
control. The communists wanted to “uproot and ultimately change
the traditional elements of society,” said Casey, citing Ames. “This
meant undermining the influence of religion and taking the young
away from their parents for education by the state.” For that reason,
the world’s two great religions had to cooperate. “Because the Soviets
saw all religious faith as an obstacle, they suppressed churches and
mosques alike.” Casey was convinced that “militant Islam and mili¬
tant Christianity should cooperate in a common cause .” 35

Inside the CIA, Casey often infuriated professional colleagues by
his nonchalant view of the growing power of political Islam. “I
worked with Casey,” says Richard Krueger, a former CIA operative
who spent the last several years of the shah’s reign working right
inside the shah’s own office. “After the revolution, I sponsored with
Casey and the heads of all the intelligence agencies a futurist exercise
at Camp Perry to analyze the Islamic movement.” According to
Krueger, John McMahon, Casey’s deputy, clashed with Casey over the
issue. “I can remember major, major unpleasantries between Casey
and McMahon over the long-term implications of the Islamic revolu¬
tion, with McMahon taking an almost alarmist position and Casey
taking a couldn’t-care-less position,” recalls Krueger. “Casey wanted
to just wave it off, and uncharacteristically McMahon jumped in. He
was agitated, talking about how Islamic fundamentalism was going to
spread to Indonesia, the Philippines. He believed the movement was a
natural to internationalize, through all sorts of religious and social
connections, and that it wouldn’t appear to be state-sponsored.” But
Casey did not agree . 36

Casey’s views on religion and politics dovetailed with President
Reagan’s own rock-ribbed faith, and together the two men had no
trouble seeing the Afghan jihad as a religious war in which Chris¬
tianity and Islam were allies against the atheistic Soviet Union. Fawaz

284 • Devil’s Game

Gerges wrote that Reagan continued the U.S. tradition of supporting
Islamic religious forces in the Middle East:

Under Reagan, U.S. policy remained wedded to supporting con¬
servative religious elements against secular, socialist and third
world nationalist forces. Whereas the administration’s public
statements were exceptionally hostile, no corresponding changes
marked its actual behavior toward the new Islamists. . . . Reagan’s
flirtation with the Islamist mujahideen factions in Afghanistan
should be situated within the context of the second phase of the
Cold War. Like his predecessors in the 1950s and 1960s, President
Reagan allied the United States with Islamist groups and states—
Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan—to combat what he
called the ‘evil empire’ and its third world clients. 37

Sometimes, Casey’s willingness to encourage political Islam
seemed strictly cynical. That was especially true when Casey dealt
with Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd. Gus Avrakotos recounted the story of
a discussion about Casey’s visit to Saudi Arabia to nail down that
year’s Saudi matching contribution to the jihad fund. “I told Casey
that he should talk to the king about ‘your Muslim brothers,’ about
using the money for food for families, for clothing, weapons, for
repairing the mosques. You should talk to him about being ‘keeper of
the faith.’” Casey replied: “Jesus, fuck, I like that—‘keeper of the
faith.’ Oh, fuck, I like that—‘keeper of the faith.’” 38 A former CIA
official involved in the jihad confirmed that story. “We would tell the
Saudis what a good thing it was that the religious Afghans were
expelling the atheistic communists,” he adds. “It was the politic thing
to say to King Fahd.” 39

Starting in 1984, Casey pushed the Saudi-Pakistan alliance to
undertake a much more explosive strategy, launching propaganda,
sabotage, and guerrilla activity across the Amu River into the Soviet
Union’s Muslim republics. “The borders in that part of the world are,
well, sort of sloppy,” says Meyer, Casey’s aide. “So all sorts of inter¬
esting things happened.” 40 A CIA official who worked with Casey at
the time says: “There were occasional forays that took place within
the territory of the Soviet Union, which scared the crap out of
Moscow.” 41 In taking such provocative steps, Casey drew on covert

Jihad II: Into Central Asia • 285

action plans that had originally been developed during the Carter
administration, but which had been rejected because of the very real
danger that the USSR would counterattack in unpredictable ways,
including either a direct strike at Pakistan or an effort to foment a
rebellion in Pakistan’s unstable province of Baluchistan.

The ISI’s Yousaf provides the most detailed account of the jihad’s
move across Afghanistan’s northern border. “The people on both
sides were Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Turkomans,” he wrote. “They shared
a common ethnic identity and, despite the communist clampdown on
religious activities, they also shared the same faith, Islam.” 42 Casey
declared, according to Yousaf: “This is the soft underbelly of the
Soviet Union.” During a visit to ISI’s headquarters, Casey “was the
first person seriously to advocate operations against the Soviets inside
their own territory.... He was convinced that stirring up trouble in
this region would be certain to give the Russian bear a bellyache.” At
first, the effort was restricted to smuggling propaganda into the
USSR’s Muslim republics, seeking to stir up Islamic fervor. During the
1980s thousands of Korans were printed in Central Asian languages
and covertly moved across the Afghan border. Some of the Korans
were printed in Saudi Arabia, others by the CIA itself, using Muslim
connections in Western Europe.

Saudi Arabia, especially, was interested in Central Asia because it
saw Iran, and the new Khomeini regime there, as a competitor trying
to spread its version of Shiite fundamentalism into Central Asia,
against Saudi Arabia’s ultra-orthodox Wahhabi brand of Sunni Islam.
A former CIA operations officer who worked closely with Saudi Ara¬
bia says that Saudi intelligence officers told him about their idea of
“colonizing the ’Stans”:

They wanted to get in there and steal a march on the Iranians, and
undercut the Russians, and make sure that Sunni Islam prevailed
over Shia Islam. The Saudis were ready to go. They said, “We’ve
got to get in there, into the ’stans, we’ve got to work together, use
Islam to break the grip of communism in the ’stans, in Kazakh¬
stan, Uzbekistan, all through there.” It was open season. Different
Saudi princes and clerics would go up there or send stuff up there,
Korans and other material. 43

2.86 • Devil’s Game

Beginning in 1984, however, it was more than just Korans and
Islamist books and propaganda. “The United States put in train a
major escalation of the war which, over the next three years, culmi¬
nated in numerous cross-border raids and sabotage missions north of
the Amu,” wrote Mohammad Yousaf. “During this period we were
specifically to train and dispatch hundreds of Mujahideen up to 25
kilometres deep inside the Soviet Union. They were probably the most
secret and sensitive operations of the war.” He added that the Soviet
Union’s “specific worry was the spread of fundamentalism and its
influence on Soviet Central Asian Muslims.” 44 The ISI official was
prepared to “send teams over the river to carry out rocket attacks,
mine-laying, derailment of trains or ambushes.” 45 Teams that did
cross the Soviet border sought contacts among Muslim activists in the
region. “I was impressed by the number of reports of people wanting
to assist,” wrote Yousaf. “Some wanted weapons, some wanted to
join the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, and others to participate in oper¬
ations inside the Soviet Union.” 46 According to Yousaf:

These cross-border strikes were at their peak in 1986. Scores of
attacks were made across the Amu from Jozjan to Badakshan
Provinces. Sometimes Soviet citizens joined in these operations, or
came back into Afghanistan to join the Mujahideen. . . . That we
were hitting a sore spot was confirmed by the ferocity of the Sovi¬
ets’ reaction. Virtually every incursion provoked massive aerial
bombing and gunship attacks on all villages south of the river in
the vicinity of our strike. 47

It was, of course, an offensive that not only risked inflaming latent
Islamist sentiment inside the Soviet Union but which could have pro¬
voked Moscow to retaliate against Pakistan itself, something that
could lead to a U.S.-Soviet global conflagration—and all of this
unfolded secretly, without the knowledge of the American public.
According to various accounts of the Afghan conflict, and from
Yousaf’s own testimony, eventually cooler heads in Washington got
the upper hand, and the cross-border attacks were halted. “By 1985, it
became obvious that the United States had got cold feet,” mourned
Yousaf. “Somebody at the top in the American administration was

Jihad II: Into Central Asia • 287

getting frightened.” But, he asserted, “the CIA, and others, gave us
every encouragement unofficially to take the war into the Soviet
Union.” 48

In the end, the Casey-ISI offensive into the Soviet Union failed to
provoke a Muslim uprising. The Brzezinski-Bennigsen theory of a
restive Muslim population chafing to revolt against its Soviet over-
lords, and loyal to an underground network of Sufi Islamists, proved
flawed, at best. Yet there is no question that the Casey-ISI actions
aided the growth of a significant network of right-wing Islamist
extremists who, to this day, still plague the governments of the former
Soviet republics, now led by regimes of varying authoritarian, but not
Islamist, character. In particular, the Islamic Movement of Uzbek¬
istan, the Islamic Liberation Party (Hizb ut-Tahrir), the powerful
Islamist groups in Chechnya and Dagestan, and the shadowy Al
Qaeda presence in Central Asia all gained momentum in the 1980s,
thanks to the spillover of the Afghan jihad.

No End to Jihad

The Afghan jihad did not end when the Soviet Union withdrew its
forces. The United States had no exit strategy and no plan for
Afghanistan in the wake of the war. Most policy makers in Washing¬
ton believed that the weak pro-Soviet government in Kabul that was
left in place would collapse in short order, but it lingered on. The
mujahideen, who fractured into factions after the war and fought
amongst themselves, continued to fight. And Pakistan, which saw
Afghanistan as its partner in a coalition against India, heavily sup¬
ported the Islamists in the shattered country.

None of this seemed to bother top U.S. officials at the time. “We
knew we were involved with Islamic fundamentalists,” said Caspar
Weinberger, who served as President Reagan’s secretary of defense.
“We knew they were not very nice people, and they were not all
people attached to democracy. But we had this terrible problem of
making choices.... Remember what Churchill said, ‘If Hitler invaded
Hell, I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the

.88 • Devil’s Game

House of Commons.’ ” 49 It was an apt characterization of U.S. policy
toward Afghanistan, Central Asia, and the “arc of Islam” in the
1980s.

There is no question that the U.S. support for the mujahideen,
most of which went to the hard-core Islamists, was a catastrophic
miscalculation. It devastated Afghanistan itself, led to the collapse of
its government, and gave rise to a landscape dominated by warlords,
both Islamists and otherwise. It created a worldwide network of
highly trained Islamist fighters from a score of countries, linked
together and roughly affiliated to Osama bin Laden’s soon-to-be
established A 1 Qaeda organization. It left behind a shattered nation
that played host to A 1 Qaeda and other assorted terrorist formations.
And it set up conditions under which Pakistan’s ISI could encourage
the growth of the Taliban movement in the 1990s.

Yet advocates of the jihad, even those who in 2005 are the
staunchest proponents of the global war on terrorism directed against
Islamist groups, assert that it was correct policy. “I think it was the
right thing do to,” says Daniel Pipes, the prolific campaigner against
political Islam and son of Richard Pipes, who coordinated the
Nationalities Working Group in the early years of the Reagan admin¬
istration. During those years, Daniel Pipes was a State Department
and National Security Council official. “We supported Stalin against
Hitler,” he says, echoing Weinberger’s theory of dealing with devils.
“These are real-world choices.” The most militant among the
mujahideen were the best fighters, according to Pipes. “If anything,
the radical Islamists were seen as more vehemently anti-Soviet.” 50 It is
a view echoed by numerous U.S. veterans of the Afghan war, includ¬
ing many CIA officials and policy makers. “The people we did sup¬
port were the nastier, more fanatic types of mujahideen,” said Stephen
P. Cohen, who was a top State Department official in the 1980s. “If
you want to win the Cold War and defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan,
you can’t use the Salvation Army.” 51

Needless to say, the “fanatic types” did not fade away after the
Soviet Union decided to withdraw from Afghanistan, although the
people sponsoring them changed dramatically: Bill Casey died, and
both General Zia and the head of ISI were killed in an unexplained

Jihad II: Into Central Asia • 289

plane crash. But the Islamic right was entrenched in both Afghanistan
and Pakistan. The Islamic Group of Pakistan was rich and powerful,
and well connected with the Muslim Brotherhood’s worldwide net¬
works. Most of the top ISI officials were now confirmed Islamists
with Muslim Brotherhood links. The Islamic Group and the Brother¬
hood, in turn, maintained strong ties to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and
the other militant Islamists in Afghanistan, and to the burgeoning
mujahideen network from dozens of countries who came and went
freely though the madrassa system. The Soviet withdrawal was cele¬
brated as a tremendous victory at the CIA and the Pentagon, and for
the most part they turned away from Afghanistan, assuming that
the pro-Soviet regime that still ruled in Kabul, led by President
Najibullah, would quickly fall. The CIA drew an analogy with how
quickly the government of South Vietnam fell after the U.S. with¬
drawal there, and they assumed that Najibullah would collapse in
short order. Still, an odd sort of morning-after queasiness developed
in U.S. government circles.

At the State Department, and even at the CIA, there was some dis¬
quiet over the prospect of Hekmatyar and other fundamentalists tak¬
ing over in Afghanistan. Soviet officials were among those warning
Washington of the dangers inherent in the Islamist movement. Soviet
Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze tried to feel out Secretary of
State George Shultz about the possibility of a U.S.-Soviet gentleman’s
agreement on the terms of a Soviet pullout, and he “asked for Ameri¬
can cooperation in limiting the spread of ‘Islamic fundamentalism.’ ”
However, other than Shultz, the administration was unsympathetic
and “no high-level Reagan administration officials ever gave much
thought to the issue. They never considered pressing Pakistani intelli¬
gence to begin shifting support away from the Muslim Brotherhood-
connected factions.” Moscow was exceedingly worried about Islamic
fundamentalism taking root along its southern frontier, however, and
even Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB, sat down with CIA
Director Gates to explain why Soviet leaders were “fearful about the
rise to power in Afghanistan of another fundamentalist government, a
Sunni complement to Shiite Iran .” 52 To no avail.

By default, the United States allowed Pakistan and the ISI to

Z90 • Devil’s Game

maintain control of the political levers in Afghanistan. The official
Saudi spigot for cash had largely shut down, but the unofficial, pri¬
vate sources of funding—through various wealthy princes, through
the Muslim World League, through the Muslim Brotherhood’s net¬
works—were still up and running. According to two U.S. ambassa¬
dors who served in Saudi Arabia at this time, the United States
handled the end of the war badly. “Where I was, nobody was looking
ahead at what would happen to these unemployed freedom fighters,”
says Walter Cutler, who was U.S. ambassador in Saudi Arabia during
most of the 1980s. “I don’t recall any discussion about, ‘Gee, I won¬
der if these guys are going to pose any threat?’ We didn’t really focus
that much on political Islam. It was the Cold War. The fact that you
had these zealots, trained and armed with Stingers, didn’t come up.” 53

“We start wars without figuring out how we would end them,”
says Charles Freeman, who was ambassador to Saudi Arabia at the
end of the 1980s and during the first Gulf War in 1991. “Afghanistan
was lurching into civil war, and we basically didn’t care anymore.”
Adds Freeman:

The Afghan struggle didn’t stop. Some of us were concerned—I
was, and so was [Robert] Oakley [U.S. ambassador in Pakistan],
who was concerned about the ISI screwing around in Afghanistan
and Kashmir, and that the Saudis were complicit in this. You
couldn’t really figure out if the Saudis were being used, or were
witting. I talked to [Prince] Turki [the head of Saudi intelligence]
about it, and to the CIA, and my message was, basically, that we
need to start thinking about disentangling ourselves. But there was
some question about whether Saudi Arabia had been captured by
the ISI. The ISI would take their money and start implementing
things, and we didn’t know what they were doing. Certainly a lot
of Saudi money was going to Hekmatyar. But we couldn’t really
figure out what the Saudi agenda was. There’d been up to $3 bil¬
lion a year flowing into the war, in all, from the United States,
Saudi Arabia, and others. You can’t just turn the spigot off
overnight. Both Bob and I thought we should have a serious dia¬
logue about it, but we couldn’t get anyone else interested, includ¬
ing [Robert] Gates and [William] Webster [both CIA directors].

Part of the attitude in Washington was, “Why should we go out

Jihad II: Into Central Asia • 2.9

there and talk to people with towels on their heads?” So we
weren’t effective .- 14

According to Yousaf, who had a bird’s-eye view of the end of the
war from his post at ISI, as the dust cleared in Afghanistan some
Americans did become alarmed at the prospect of Hekmatyar and his
fellow fundamentalists taking power. “The Americans began to look
at an Afghanistan without the Red Army,” he wrote. “What they saw
alarmed them.” But, he said, Gen. Akhtar Abdel Rahman Khan, the
ISI architect of the jihad, managed to counter the ineffectual U.S.
efforts to strengthen potential Afghan non-fundamentalist groups,
including the forces allied to the exiled king, Zahir Shah, and to other,
less Islamist parties and individuals. “General Akhtar understood [the
Americans’] aims and methods and opposed their every move.”
Akhtar also opposed what Yousaf calls “the Americans’ bright idea of
bringing back the long-exiled Zahir Shah to head a government of
national reconciliation.” 55

Even had the United States wanted to exert itself to minimize the
power of the fundamentalists after the war, and to enhance the strength
of the moderates, centrists, and secularists, it would have been difficult—
for the simple reason that most of them were dead. At the same time
that the largely Islamist mujahideen were battling the USSR, they were
also killing potential postwar Afghan opponents by the thousands, in a
little-known second front of the jihad directed against non-communist
Afghanis. “In Afghanistan, we made a deliberate choice,” says Cheryl
Benard, a RAND Corporation expert on political Islam, who is married
to Zalmay Khalilzad, who served as U.S. ambassador in Kabul. “At first,
everyone thought. There’s no way to beat the Soviets. So what we have
to do is to throw the worst crazies against them that we can find, and
there was a lot of collateral damage. We knew exactly who these people
were, and what their organizations were like, and we didn’t care,” she
says. “Then, we allowed them to get rid of, just kill all the moderate
leaders. The reason we don’t have moderate leaders in Afghanistan
today is because we let the nuts kill them all. They killed the leftists, the
moderates, the middle-of-the-roaders. They were just eliminated, dur¬
ing the 1980s and afterward.” 56

292 • Devil’s Game

Secret Deals with the Ayatollahs

The wreckage left behind in Afghanistan could have been even worse
had the Reagan administration’s secret initiatives toward Iran from
1980 to 1986 borne fruit. There are three episodes in regard to Iran
that paralleled America’s alliance with fundamentalist Islam in
Afghanistan: the so-called October Surprise in 1980, Israel’s secret
relationship with Iran during the 1980s, and the 1984-86 covert
Reagan administration approach to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran.

In 1980, as Carter administration officials frantically tried to
secure the release of the U.S. hostages in Iran, it appears likely that
members of the Reagan campaign team, including Casey, established
contacts with Iranian officials, in an effort to postpone the hostages'
release until after the election.

Gary Sick, a U.S. Navy officer who served on the National Security
Council staff under Ford, Carter, and Reagan, concluded years later
that the Reagan-Bush campaign did in fact enter into secret talks with
Iranian leaders to prevent the release of the hostages and to promise
to ship U.S. and Israeli arms to Iran in 1981. He penned a detailed
account of his findings in the book October Surprise: America's
Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan. In it, he con¬
cludes: “The Reagan-Bush campaign mounted a professionally orga¬
nized intelligence operation to subvert the American democratic
process.” 57

Sick suspected that the basis for the GOP-Iran talks was a promise
that a Republican administration would look with favor on the ship¬
ment of Israeli and other arms to Iran, possibly including U.S. stock¬
piles of weapons that the shah had ordered and paid for. Iran
desperately needed weapons for its fight with Iraq, which erupted into
a full-scale war in September 1980. Israel, which had a long military
relationship with Iran going back to the two countries’ first major
arms deal in 1966, was eager to supply Teheran’s clerical regime with
weapons, despite the hostage crisis. “Israel’s almost frantic efforts to
reopen an arms relationship with Iran were being thwarted by Presi¬
dent Carter, who stubbornly refused to acquiesce to even token Israeli

Jihad II: Into Central Asia • 29 3

arms shipments until the hostages were free,” wrote Sick. 58 Interest¬
ingly, the key Iranian broker for arms talks between Israel and Iran
was Ahmed Kashani, the son of Ayatollah Seyyed Abolqassem
Kashani, the cleric who received CIA payments in 1953 in order to
organize mobs demanding the overthrow of Mossadegh and the
return of the shah. Kashani visited Israel in 1980, according to Sick,
who adds that “other channels between Israel and Iran were function¬
ing long before he arrived.” In the spring of 1980, a small Israeli arms
shipment arrived in Iran. 59

Sick provides a detailed account of contacts and meetings between
Casey, other Reagan officials, and a host of Iranian go-betweens, sev¬
eral of whom would turn up as part of the 1984-86 Iran-contra scan¬
dal. 60 Some of them, in turn, had close contacts in Israel, and Israel
and Iran began closer military cooperation in late 1980, including—
most spectacularly—Israel’s June 7, 1981, air raid that destroyed
Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility, only days after the outbreak of the Iran-
Iraq war. “Israel provided Iran with information on how to attack the
nuclear facility but... the Iraqi air defense was too good for the Iran¬
ian air force,” reported Sick. 61 So Israel did it.

Casey, according to Sick, helped Iran break the U.S. embargo on
Israeli arms for Iran. “William Casey struck exactly the kind of
unsentimental bargain with the Iranian clerics that the Iran lobby in
Israel had been looking for,” wrote Sick. “Israel was approached in
August not only by Casey but by officials within the CIA who encour¬
aged Israel to cooperate with the Republican initiative as a means of
freeing the hostages.” 62 At the NSC, Sick was getting reports of Israeli
arms deliveries to Iran, in defiance of Carter’s opposition. “The Israeli
leadership, at the very highest level, had deliberately, almost contemp¬
tuously turned its back on Jimmy Carter’s administration.” 63 In the
end, the hostages were freed, but only on January 20, 1981, minutes
after Reagan was sworn in as America’s fortieth president. “Few sus¬
pected,” wrote Sick, that the release of the hostages “was the denoue¬
ment of an elaborate plot that had been hatched months before by
William Casey.” 64

The secret Reagan-Casey contacts with Iran in 1980-81 foreshad¬
owed efforts during the Reagan administration to maintain covert ties

2.94 • Devil’s Game

with the Iranian ayatollahs. Some U.S. officials saw Iran as an ally in
the growing war in Afghanistan, since Khomeini was bitterly opposed
to the Soviet Union and wanted to extend Iranian influence into
Afghanistan and Central Asia. Others saw Iran as a counterweight to
Iraq, for two reasons: first, because of the Soviet Union’s close ties to
Baghdad, but second, and more important, because a powerful Iraq
was seen as a threat to Israel.

During the Iran-Iraq war, the United States pursued two policies at
the same time. Washington’s main approach was the “tilt” toward
Iraq during its war with Iran. Officials who supported the pro-Iraq tilt
correctly saw Iran as the major threat to American interests in the
region, since the defeat of Iraq by Iran’s fundamentalist regime would
open the way to Iranian domination of the entire Persian Gulf, includ¬
ing Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Virtually the entire Arab world backed
Iraq in its war with Iran, and the United States provided limited sup¬
port to Iraq, including intelligence on Iran’s capabilities and troop
deployments.

But Israel—along with many U.S. neoconservative officials, includ¬
ing Casey—saw it differently.

From 1980 to 1987, even as the United States officially backed Iraq,
the Israelis supplied Iran with a steady stream of arms, ammunition,
and spare parts. Whether or not it was part of a secret deal between
Casey, Israel, and Iran, the Reagan administration did nothing to get
Israel to stop arming the ayatollahs. In doing so, Israel was drawing
on its many contacts with Iran during the shah’s rule. When the shah
was toppled, the Israelis continued to work with Iranian army and
intelligence officers they knew, even though the officers were now
reporting to mullahs and ayatollahs. Israel’s ties to Khomeini’s Iran
were multifaceted. They had links to Iran’s armed forces and the suc¬
cessor organization to the shah’s SAVAK secret service. In addition,
thousands of Iranian Jews had long been active in the bazaar mer¬
chant class, many of whom had immigrated to Israel but maintained
ties to Iran, including links to the families of the wealthier, conserva¬
tive ayatollahs. Israel capitalized on those contacts, too.

“Israel was dealing with the regime in Iran as a semi-ally,” says
Patrick Lang, who headed the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency’s

Jihad II: Into Central Asia • 295

Middle East section. 65 “They were dealing with the same people they
dealt with under the shah. During these years, the Israelis were having
meetings once a month in Europe with people from the Iranian air
force. ” According to Lang, these Israel-Iran meetings took place for
many years. Israel, he said, would ask Iran what sort of arms it
needed, then take Teheran’s shopping list to see what it could provide.
At the time, the Reagan administration had instituted what was called
Operation Staunch in 1984, to cut the arms flow to Iran and Iraq, but
the Israelis flouted it and Reagan never used America’s influence in
Israel to get them to halt the arms deliveries. “The Israelis were doing
this all along,” Lang says. “At the Defense Intelligence Agency, we
found out about it when an Iranian air force colonel defected to us
and told us about it.” Still, says Lang, President Reagan’s team looked
the other way. “My impression is that we didn’t try too hard to stop
it,” says Lang. In just the immediate period after the release of the
U.S. hostages, Israel supplied Iran with $300 million worth of mili¬
tary equipment. The shipments included spare parts for U.S. F-4 air¬
craft, M-48 tanks, and M-113 armored personnel carriers. 66

An important incident in 1983 reveals the extent to which Casey’s
CIA worked with Iran’s intelligence service when it was in both coun¬
tries’ mutual interest to do so. In 1982, Vladimir Kuzichkin, who had
served as the station chief in Teheran for the Soviet KGB, defected to
Great Britain. During the revolution, Kuzichkin had ably represented
Soviet interests in Iran, but in fact the Soviet presence in Iran was
quite small, and did not threaten either the United States or the shah.
According to Kuzichkin, who later wrote a book about his experi¬
ence, the KGB had a grand total of two agents in government and offi¬
cial Iranian circles. “I could not believe my eyes, but it was a fact, and
facts do not go away,” he wrote. “I was very surprised at the small
number of agents in Iran.” 67 Kuzichkin also wrote that the USSR val¬
ued the stability of Iran under the shah and that Moscow never had
any contacts with either the Islamist revolutionaries or the so-called
Islamic Marxist groups that briefly made common cause with
Khomeini. 68 But the KGB station did support the small and ineffective
Tudeh Communist Party in Iran.

When Kuzichkin defected, he decided to win favor in Anglo-

2.96 • Devil’s Game

American circles by giving MI6 and the CIA everything he knew about
the Tudeh and its members. “He provided the British with a list of
several hundred Soviet agents operating in Iran,” wrote James Bill.
Almost immediately, MI6 and the CIA handed Kuzichkin’s informa¬
tion to the Iranian intelligence service:

Kuzichkin’s information was shared with the Iranian authorities,
who arrested over 1,000 Tudeh party members, many of whom
had already been under surveillance. Those arrested included
Nureddin Kianuri [the Tudeh leader, who admitted] that he had
maintained contact with Soviet agents since 1945. This dramatic
destruction of the Tudeh party in 1983 completed the dismantling
of the Iranian left. 69

None of this, of course, was made public at the time. Americans knew
nothing about the CIA’s sub rosa cooperation with Khomeini’s Iran,
nothing about Israel’s ongoing arms supply to Iran, and, later, nothing
about the Iran-contra initiative toward Iran, until it was revealed by a
Lebanese newspaper. Mel Goodman, a former CIA analyst who
headed the agency’s team analyzing Soviet policy in the Third World,
confirms that the CIA was part of the Kuzichkin-Ml6 connection to
Iran. “The CIA was involved in that, too,” says Goodman. “They
were working with the ayatollah to wrap up the Tudeh Party. There
was a lot of [cable] traffic on it. Kuzichkin was being run by the
British and he provided a lot of information.” According to Good¬
man, the CIA and MI6 were working with Iranian intelligence offi¬
cials who had been part of the old SAVAK organization, and who
simply shifted loyalty to the new Islamic republic. 70

Most notorious among the former SAVAK officials now cooperat¬
ing with the new regime was Hossein Fardoust. Fardoust was a child¬
hood friend of the shah, who had attended school in Switzerland with
both the shah and future CIA director Richard Helms. Fardoust had
risen to a high position in Iranian intelligence in the 1970s, and in
1976 he was named to head the Organization of Imperial Inspection,
which was reconstituted by the shah. In his memoirs, the shah
describes the inspectorate as “a modern version of what the ancient

Jihad II: Into Central Asia • 297

Persians had called ‘the eyes and ears of the king.’” 71 Its job was to
keep track of political currents in the country, including among the
clergy. But Fardoust joined the pro-Khomeini opposition, secretly.
Princess Ashraf, the shrewd and ruthless sister of the shah, recalled in
her memoirs that Fardoust failed, deliberately, to inform the shah of
what the mullahs were doing:

Curiously, SAVAK—the supposedly all-seeing, all-knowing intelli¬
gence source—made no reports on the extent and manner in
which the mullahs were now using the sanctity of the pulpit to
undermine the throne. . .. Each day my brother met with Hossein
Fardoust, ... the same Fardoust of childhood, whose assignment
was to gather, evaluate, and distill all intelligence reports. ... I am
convinced that Fardoust must have withheld vital information
from the Shah and was, in fact, in active negotiation with
Khomeini during the last years of the regime. I think the events
following the revolution support my view; at a time when anyone
remotely connected with the Shah was being summarily executed,
Hossein Fardoust remains alive and well, prospering under the
new administration as one of the heads of SAVAMA (which is
Khomeini’s name for SAVAK). 72

Whether it was the mysterious Fardoust or someone else, both the
CIA and the Israelis had channels into Iran’s intelligence service from
the first days of the revolution through the start of the Casey-North
conspiracy in the mid-1980s. Seen in this context, the Iran-contra
affair is not some strange aberration, but simply an extension of a
preexisting relationship that dated back to 1979. Within the Reagan
administration, a small clique of conservatives, and neoconservatives,
were most intimately involved in the Iran-contra initiative, especially
those U.S. officials and consultants who were closest to the Israeli mil¬
itary and intelligence establishment.

The record of the Iran affair has been told and retold in various
books, memoirs, and official government reports. 73 The entire busi¬
ness was complex and multilayered, and it tied U.S. and Israeli arms
shipments to Iran to illegal financial support for the Nicaraguan
guerrillas backed by the Reagan administration. Critics of the U.S.

2 .9 s • Devil’s Game

approach to Iran accuse Reagan and his advisers of seeking to trade
arms with Iran for the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon held by
Hezbollah, an Iranian cat’s-paw. Indeed, to President Reagan himself,
the deal with Iran may have appeared to be simply an effort to get the
hostages released, although the president (in later testimony) said that
he could not recall approving the arms transfers to Iran. To his advis¬
ers, however—especially to the neoconservatives and Casey—it had a
much broader purpose, namely, an attempt to reengage with Iran, in
direct opposition to the official U.S. policy of supporting Iraq in its
resistance to Iranian expansionism.

The context for the secret Casey-North approach to Iran was the
National Security Council’s 1984 reevaluation of U.S. policy toward
Iran. That reevaluation was pushed by a small clique of U.S. officials
opposed to the American tilt in favor of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war.
Robert McFarlane, the national security adviser, ordered the NSC
review, and several officials—including Howard Teicher and Donald
Fortier at the NSC, Graham Fuller at the CIA, and others—began a
two-year-long campaign to shift U.S. policy in favor of Iran. Their
effort dovetailed nicely with parallel Israeli efforts to isolate Iraq and
connect with Iran. At the time, Israel was supplying arms to Iran,
backing the rise of the Islamic right in the occupied territories, fueling
the Muslim Brotherhood’s civil war in Syria, and fiercely supporting
the Islamists in Afghanistan.

In 1985, Fuller—working along with Teicher and Fortier—
produced an infamous Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE)
that called for the United States to provide arms to the ayatollahs’
regime and a draft policy paper that said that the United States should
“encourage Western allies and friends to help Iran meet its import
requirements . . . including provision of selected military equipment.” 74
Both Secretary of State Shultz and Secretary of Defense Weinberger
strongly opposed the idea, but CIA Director Casey backed it. In the
midst of this internal battle, Israel stepped in, using intermediaries to
propose a joint U.S.-Israeli effort to approach Iran and sell Teheran
weapons. The U.S. contact for the Israeli intelligence scheme was
Michael Ledeen, a neoconservative NSC consultant, who was sent to

Jihad II: Into Central Asia • 2.99

Israel by McFarlane to discuss the idea. Specifically, Israel wanted to
ship HAWK antiaircraft and TOW antitank missiles to the Iranians,
weapons considered critical in Iran’s war with Iraq, along with a
U.S. commitment to resupply Israel with the missiles once they were
sent. Israel’s rationale was the release of the U.S. hostages, but of
course Israel—and elements within the American administration—had
broader, pro-Iranian strategic concerns, not related to the hostages.

Teicher, in particular, vehemently supported the Iran initiative. In
1980, when Iran and Iraq went to war, “I renewed my campaign
against the nascent tilt toward Iraq,” wrote Teicher in his memoirs.
He added that some U.S. officials viewed the war as a way to under¬
mine the Islamist threat from Iran, which at the time was holding
fifty-three Americans captive. “The Arabists in the U.S. government
saw the Iraqi invasion as an opportunity to eliminate the growing
threat of Iranian-sponsored Islamic fundamentalism.” 75

Advocates for selling arms to Iran made two seriously flawed argu¬
ments. The first was that there were moderates inside Iran who
wanted to deal with the United States, and who would look with
favor upon a U.S. goodwill offer to replenish Iran’s dwindling arsenal.
The second was that Iran was internally weak and unstable, and ripe
for a Soviet takeover that could bring the USSR into the Gulf. Both
arguments were wildly inaccurate—and so was the belief that token
arms shipments could win freedom for U.S. hostages in Lebanon. At
the start of the Iran initiative, an Israeli intelligence official told
McFarlane that “the Israelis planned to provide some arms to moder¬
ates in Iran who would oppose Khomeini.” The idea that some pow¬
erful faction of Iranian moderates would emerge to greet the United
States and Israel with open arms and take action against Khomeini
captivated many of the U.S. participants in the Iran-contra affair,
including Casey himself. But it was a mirage. According to a former
senior CIA official, it took a lot of doing in the mid-1980s to convince
Casey that the chimerical “moderates” were not there. “There were
no moderates to speak of in 1986,” says the CIA official. When Ollie
North, McFarlane, and other U.S. and Israeli officials were planning a
secret visit to Iran to try to make a deal, the official says, Casey—who

300 • Devil’s Game

had approved the plan—wanted to know if the plan would work.
“Casey called me in and asked, Did I think this mission had a chance
of success? I told him, ‘Not much.’ And there wasn’t really a chance
of success.” Asked if Casey ultimately believed that Iranian moderates
would respond in a positive way to the U.S. gambit, the official says:
“Probably not after talking to me.” 76 Says W. Patrick Lang, who was
then director of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Middle East sec¬
tion: “Their view was that there were lots of moderates in Iran who
are not what they seem to be, which was a bunch of jackasses. And I
said, that’s exactly what they are—jackasses.”

The more significant argument, that Iran might fall to the USSR,
was absurd on its face. The Soviet Union was battling insurgents in
Afghanistan, it had little or no assets inside Iran, and Soviet leaders had
no intention of crossing the red line into the Persian Gulf, a region that
FDR, Eisenhower, and Carter had all proclaimed a zone of American
predominance. Yet in a May 1985 memo to Casey, called “Toward a
Policy toward Iran,” the CIA’s Fuller argued, “The Khomeini regime is
faltering... . The U.S. has almost no cards to play; the USSR has
many.” According to Fuller, U.S. intelligence analysts felt that Moscow
was making “progress toward developing significant leverage in
Tehran” and that the U.S. policy forbidding arms sales to Iran “may
now serve to facilitate Soviet interests more than our own.” He added:

It is imperative, however, that we perhaps think in terms of a
bolder—and perhaps riskier—policy which will at least ensure
greater U.S. voice in the unfolding situation. Right now, unless we
are very lucky indeed, we stand to gain nothing and lose more in
the outcome of developments in Iran, which are all outside our
control. 77

Fuller was developing a view that made him increasingly sympa¬
thetic to fundamentalist Islam, and in his testimony to the Tower
Commission, a three-man panel, appointed by President Reagan and
led by former senator John Tower of Texas, assigned to investigate the
NSC’s role in the Iran-contra scandal, he said that a problem was that
“the Iranian regime perceived us as implacably hostile towards an

Jihad II: Into Central Asia • 30 :

Islamic republic in principle.” 78 In his controversial SNIE and other
analyses, Fuller insisted the United States would drive Iran into the
Soviet camp unless it allowed Israel and other allies to arm the mul¬
lahs. It said that to the extent that American “allies,” including Israel,
“can fill a military gap for Iran will be a critical measure of the West’s
ability to blunt Soviet influence.” 79

Fuller’s analysis was hotly disputed by other intelligence officials.
Fuller’s SNIE said that “the Iran revolution was phony, that it was led
by a bunch of agricultural reformers who didn’t really care about
Islam and that they would make common cause with the Soviet
Union,” says the DIA’s Lang. “I got another NIE started, which was
finished five months later. And it said exactly the opposite, but it
didn’t have the same impact.” In the meantime, Fuller, Teicher, and
others pressed ahead to translate Fuller’s SNIE into U.S. policy, seek¬
ing to draft a presidential directive that called for “a vigorous policy
designed to block Soviet advances in the short-term while trying to
restore the U.S. position in Iran which existed under the shah.” The
directive, couched in anti-Soviet, Cold War terms, virtually called for
an alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran against the USSR, includ¬
ing “continued Iranian resistance to Soviet expansion (in particular, in
Afghanistan).” The draft encouraged Israel and other U.S. allies to
arm Iran, and it called for the United States to “establish links with,
and provide support to, Iranian leaders who might be receptive to
efforts to improve relations with the United States.” It also called on
the Voice of America to “increase efforts to discredit Moscow’s
Islamic credentials.”

“Iran still represented the strategic prize in the modern Great
Game,” wrote Teicher. “McFarlane agreed with Fuller’s analysis and
directed Fortier and me to draft an NSDD [National Security Deci¬
sion Directive]. The NSDD was based on Fuller’s analysis [and it]
argued that... the United States should establish a dialogue with
Iranian leaders. The proposal included the provision of selected mili¬
tary equipment to Iran as determined on a case-by-case basis.” 80
The Iran initiative proceeded but was later shot down by Shultz and
Weinberger. The latter scribbled the word “absurd” on Teicher’s draft

302 • Devil’s Game

NSDD. “I also added that this is roughly like inviting Qaddafi over
for a cozy lunch,” said Weinberger. 81 According to Teicher, Vice Pres¬
ident Bush and CIA Director Casey “strongly supported it.” 82

By the end of the Reagan administration, the Iran-contra initia¬
tive had come to light, and it was being investigated by journalists, a
special prosecutor, and congressional committees. The olive branch to
the Iranians had failed. Only a single hostage had been released
during the initiative, and not necessarily because of it. No Iranian
“moderates” spoke up, and those who cooperated with the Reagan
administration and Israel in secret, such as Ali Akbar Hashemi-
Rafsanjani, a future Iranian president, covered their tracks by appear¬
ing to become even more bellicose.

The Afghan jihad ended—or appeared to end—with the withdrawal
of Soviet forces. But the legacy of that conflict, including well-trained
terrorist operatives and a worldwide Islamist machine, would continue
to plague the United States and the West. In the 1990s, Afghanistan fell
to the Wahhabi Taliban movement; Algeria was engulfed in a civil war
against the Islamic right; and Islamist terrorists wreaked havoc in
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon; and Osama bin Laden put A 1
Qaeda together. Through it all, the United States struggled, unsuccess¬
fully, to adopt a coherent policy toward political Islam. The conse¬
quences of its failure to do so, and its continued benign view of the
Islamic right, would become painfully obvious on September n, 2001.

CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?

The Cold War ended in 1991. But, if the Cold War was World
War III, does that mean, as some conservatives argue, that the United
States is now engaged in World War IV, this time against Islam? Is
Islamic fundamentalism the “new communism”? Is the war on terror¬
ism the twenty-first-century equivalent of the global struggle against
the Soviet Union? How serious, really, is the threat of Islamist terror¬
ism? And how—if at all—did America’s relationship to political Islam
change with the end of the Cold War?

The central theme of this book is that the Islamic right was seen as
a valuable U.S. ally during the Cold War. Was that alliance super¬
seded, or rendered superfluous, by the disappearance of the U.S.-
Soviet rivalry? With the elimination of its communist enemy, did the
Islamic right direct its wrath instead toward the Great Satans of the
secular West? Is the United States now facing a worldwide enemy,
comprising a hydra-headed monster tied to a network of states—Iran,
Syria, Libya, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia—that Michael Ledeen, the
Iran-contra veteran, calls the “terror masters”?

Since September 11, 2001, the notion that the United States and
the Muslim world are on a collision course has gained credence. If the
first Iraq war in 1991 marked the start of the short-lived New World

304 • Devil’s Game

Order, does the second Iraq war in 2003 symbolize an entirely
different era: the Clash of Civilizations? Proponents of this view—
popularized by Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington—see President
Bush’s war on terrorism not as a struggle against A 1 Qaeda and its
radical allies, but as a titanic struggle pitting Judeo-Christian civiliza¬
tion against the Muslim world. Fittingly, in the Pentagon, the Global
War on Terrorism is known by its acronym, G-WOT, pronounced
“gee what,” thus neatly rhyming with “jihad.”

Leading neoconservatives, such as James Woolsey, the former CIA
director and Commentary's Norman Podhoretz proclaimed that the
struggle against Islam was indeed World War IV. Joined by key Bush
administration officials, they compared the power of the Islamic
right—and sometimes, the religion of Islam itself—to that of fascism
or communism. It was, they said, a globe-spanning opponent whose
existence threatened America’s survival, and because of it, previously
unthinkable steps had to be taken. To fight World War IV would
require a new U.S. doctrine of unilateral, preventive wars, an offen¬
sive posture that included wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, and then
other nations, and vast increases in U.S. military and intelligence
budgets. It would mean the creation of a surveillance state at home,
with the Department of Homeland Security, the USA Patriot Act, the
Pentagon’s Northern Command for deploying the armed forces inside
the United States, and new Justice Department rules giving the FBI,
the police, and Joint Terrorism Task Forces in fifty-three U.S. cities
significant new authority.

On closer examination, however, the clash of civilizations, the war
on terror, and the Bush administration campaign to reshape the Middle
East were rife with paradoxes, contradictions, and outright lies.

The enemy that attacked the United States on September 11 was not
Islam, nor was it Islamic fundamentalism, nor was it the Muslim Broth¬
erhood, Hezbollah, Hamas, or any other group of violence-prone mili¬
tants on the Islamic right. Rather, it was A 1 Qaeda. Osama bin Laden’s
organization is not a global power, and it does not pose an existential
threat to the United States. It is a group of fanatics with a tightly disci¬
plined command structure demanding mafia-style, blood-oath loyal¬
ties. Its attack on New York and Washington in 2001 outraged the

Clash of Civilizations? • 305

entire world, and an effective counterattack—using intelligence, legal
action, political and diplomatic pressure, and highly selective military
strikes—could have weakened and then destroyed it. Unquestionably,
the destruction of Al Qaeda could have been accomplished without
a war in Afghanistan, without a war in Iraq, and without a “war on
terrorism.”

But the Bush administration deliberately inflated the specific threat
from Al Qaeda itself. Certainly, bin Laden’s group has proved itself
capable of inflicting severe damage. Since 9/11, it has struck targets in
Saudi Arabia, Spain, Turkey, and elsewhere. Despite Attorney Gen¬
eral Ashcroft’s unsubstantiated claim in zooi that thousands of Al
Qaeda operatives had infiltrated the United States, however, in the
almost four years after 9/11 not a single violent act by Al Qaeda
occurred in America. And there is no shred of evidence that Al Qaeda
has acquired or is about to acquire any nuclear, biological, or chemi¬
cal weapons. In short, while bin Laden can launch terrorist strikes,
and may do so again, the actual threat that Al Qaeda poses is circum¬
scribed and manageable. Many other nations, including Israel, Ire¬
land, and Italy, have weathered far more serious terrorist threats over
many years.

Equally, neither Al Qaeda, nor its ideological comrades, nor the
Islamic right as a whole—nor, for that matter, the entire Muslim
world—present the kind of challenge to America’s global hegemony
that the Soviet Union clearly did. No combination of Middle East
states, most of which are weak, impoverished, and wracked by inter¬
nal divisions, is able to mount a threat to the United States in a man¬
ner that would justify an enterprise called “World War IV.” But by
describing the Islamist threat in such an exaggerated way, the Bush
administration and its neoconservative allies created a pretext for an
imperial expansion of the U.S. presence in the greater Middle East,
including Pakistan, Central Asia, and the eastern Mediterranean/Red
Sea/Indian Ocean region. It is fair to ask if the virtual U.S. occupation
of the Middle East is related to goals other than anti-terrorism. Is it
because neoconservatives want to anchor U.S. global hegemony by
planting the flag in that vital, but unstable region? Is it because as
much as two-thirds of the world’s oil is in Saudi Arabia and Iraq? Is it

3°6 • Devil’s Game

because the Bush administration has forged such intimate ties to Ariel
Sharon and the Israeli right?

The notion that Islamist terrorism is really the U.S. government’s
target is contradicted by the targets of the Bush administration’s
Middle East policy. Why, if the enemy is Islamist terrorism, did the
administration invest so much energy against Iraq, Syria, and the
PLO? Both Syria’s president, Bashir Assad, and the late chairman of
the PLO, Yasser Arafat, were implacable opponents of the Muslim
Brotherhood, but they found themselves added incongruously to the
list of A 1 Qaeda’s allies. By attacking Iraq, the Bush administration
also found an inappropriate target. Since coming to power in 1968,
Saddam Hussein was a determined enemy of the Islamists, from Iran’s
Ayatollah Khomeini to terrorist Shiite groups to A 1 Qaeda itself. The
Arab Baath Socialist Party, in both its Iraqi and Syrian branches, is
resolutely secular, and the Bush administration’s efforts to link Iraq
to A 1 Qaeda were ridiculed by the CIA and the State Department. In
fact, in invading Iraq, President Bush made common cause with the
Islamic right: before, during, and after the invasion, the United States
supported the Iraqi National Congress exile coalition, in which two
Shiite fundamentalist parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and the Islamic Call (Al-Dawa), played
prominent roles. Both SCIRI and Dawa had close ties to the Islamic
Republic of Iran, and after the war, both worked closely with Ayatollah
Ali al-Sistani.

Not only did the Bush administration pick the wrong targets, but
its military-run war on terrorism is exactly the wrong way to reduce
the appeal of the Islamic right. Putting Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, and
similar terrorist groups to one side, the far broader constellation of
right-wing Islamic groups, institutions, and political parties in the
Muslim world does in fact represent a significant threat—not to U.S.
national security but to governments, intellectuals, progressives, and
other freethinkers in the swath of nations from Morocco to Indone¬
sia. From Algeria’s FIS to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to the Pales¬
tinian Hamas to Iraq’s Shiite fundamentalists to Pakistan’s Islamic
Group, together with the support of ultra-orthodox Wahhabi clerics
in Saudi Arabia, organizations such as the Muslim World League, and

Clash of Civilizations? • 307

the Islamic banks, there is indeed a threat to the Middle East. It is,
however, a threat that cannot be dealt with by military means. Indeed,
it will get worse in precise proportion to the intrusiveness of the U.S.
political, military, and economic presence in the region. Only by rap¬
idly withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq, by reducing America’s
overweening presence in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and by reversing
U.S. support for Israel’s aggressive opposition to Palestinian national¬
ism can the United States undercut the anger, frustration, and resent¬
ment that fuels Islamism.

Reducing America’s footprint in the Middle East is the polar oppo¬
site of the Bush administration’s policy, however. Cynically perhaps,
the administration has wielded the idea of a broad struggle against
terrorism to pursue a policy aimed at redrawing the entire map of the
Middle East. The radical, or “idealist” neoconservatives, from admin¬
istration officials to armchair strategists at think tanks such as the
American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, and the Project
for a New American Century, announced that the wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq were just the first two salvos in a sweeping plan to seize con¬
trol of Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states. Even the more
mainstream Bush administration officials, while eschewing some of
the neoconservatives’ visions, support the idea of a greater U.S. mili¬
tary presence in the region from North Africa to Indonesia.

Astute critics of the Bush administration’s military-based anti¬
terrorism policies and imperial pretensions have argued that it is a
strategy guaranteed to backfire, and one that seems designed to create
more terrorists than it kills. Anger against the occupation of Iraq and
Afghanistan is likely to draw new jihadists into battle in those two
countries, and the conflict could spread into both Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia, where conservative, Islam-oriented governments could fall to
far more radical dissident groups associated with bin Laden, the
mujahideen, the Taliban, and a Wahhabi extremist underground.

A second prong of the Bush administration’s Middle East policy is
likely to prove equally Counterproductive, namely, its vaunted call for
democratic reform.

The administration’s support for democracy in the region is, on
the surface at least, a stunning about-face. For years, especially during

308 • Devil’s Game

the Cold War, the United States propped up dictators, kings, emirs,
and presidents-for-life in the Middle East and around the world. In
the Arab world—in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and the Gulf—
many of these autocrats ruled in part by forging an alliance with the
Islamic right, with the support of U.S. policy makers. Throughout
these years, opposition to the region’s kleptocracies and right-wing
regimes came exclusively from the left—from American liberals, from
the European left, from the Soviet Union. Certainly, the elimination of
dictatorships and the establishment of fledgling democracies in the
Arab world, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Muslim Africa ought to
be a valued goal.

But the Bush administration’s version of democratic reform is
suspect.

First, it is opportunistic. Much of the momentum for the Bush
administration’s emphasis on Arab democracy came only when the
2003 invasion of Iraq belied the White House’s stated objectives in
launching the war: to find Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and
to uncover Iraq’s supposed ties to A 1 Qaeda. When those two ratio¬
nales proved to be fictional, President Bush shifted to a new one—that
America’s raison de la guerre was to bring democracy to Iraq.

Second, the Bush administration cynically distinguishes between
pro-American dictatorships in the Middle East and anti-American
ones, concentrating its pressure for democracy on the latter. In the con¬
text of the Bush administration’s imperial Middle East policy, its call
for imposing democracy can only be seen as a spearhead for intensified
U.S. political and military involvement in the region. True democracies
in the oil-producing countries would pursue bold, nationalist initia¬
tives that are almost guaranteed to run afoul of the Bush administra¬
tion’s long-range plans for the region. Only the naive believe that the
United States, in pursuing a “regime change” strategy in a part of the
world that contains two-thirds of the world’s oil, desires the emer¬
gence of governments that might resist U.S. regional hegemony. Cer¬
tainly, the Bush administration does not favor the development of
Arab or Iranian democracies that would forge closer ties with, say,
Russia or China at American expense. Instead, its calls for democratic
change in the Middle East allow the Bush administration to apply

Clash of Civilizations? • 309

greater or less pressure selectively on governments in the region in
order to achieve particular U.S. national security goals.

Thus, Syria is now squeezed between Israel and U.S.-occupied Iraq,
and Iran is positioned between Iraq and NATO-occupied Afghanistan.
Since 2001, the United States has achieved a position of unparalleled
supremacy in the region. The neoconservatives who argued success¬
fully for war in Iraq want nothing more than a calibrated American
effort toward forcible regime change in Syria and Iran, in order to
create a block of new states in combination with Israel, Turkey, and
Pakistan—but organized and managed under U.S. tutelage.

And what about the pro-American autocracies such as Saudi Ara¬
bia, Jordan, and Egypt? To the extent that President Bush extends his
pressure for imperial democracy beyond Iraq, Syria, Iran, and the
PLO to the pro-Western governments in the region, the effort must be
taken with a grain of salt. Because it is comprised of constituencies
with differing perspectives, the administration has sent mixed signals
in regard to its two most important Arab allies. Mainstream U.S. pol¬
icy makers, officials at the CIA and the State Department, and their
allies with vested interests in the region—the oil companies, banks,
and defense contractors—want the Bush administration to go slow on
pressing Cairo and Riyadh for change. Others, more ideological, seem
to exhibit the messianic belief that the experiment in Iraq must be
forcibly replicated in both Egypt and Saudi Arabia. And some radical
neoconservatives, such as Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen, roughly
lump Saudi Arabia with Syria and Iran as a supporter of A 1 Qaeda
and demand that Riyadh be added to the president’s axis-of-evil ene¬
mies’ list. All of them overlook the fact that both Egypt and Saudi
Arabia have been under both internal and external pressure to liberal¬
ize their regimes for decades, and from time to time both have experi¬
mented, cautiously, with democratic reform—only to pull back. The
need for delicacy in dealing with these two countries often escapes the
Bush administration’s more ideological partisans.

But in the context of examining U.S. policy toward the Islamic right,
the twin cases of Egypt and Saudi Arabia are fraught with dangerous
possibilities. Pressing too hard for liberalization in either country could
result in bringing the Islamic right to power in both Cairo and Riyadh.

3io • Devil’s Game

As during the Cold War, however, when the United States pre¬
ferred Islamism to Arab nationalism, the Bush administration and its
neoconservative allies have sometimes expressed their preference for
the Islamic right, too. If forced to choose between regimes in Egypt
and Saudi Arabia led by left-leaning Arab nationalists or right-leaning
Islamists, Washington will pick the Islamists every time. Despite their
rhetoric about a clash of civilizations, the Bush administration has
not been averse to seeking allies among the Islamic right. In Iraq, the
Bush administration after the war found itself in a partnership with
Ayatollah Sistani, two Iranian-connected parties, and the forces of
organized Shiite fundamentalism. Leading neoconservatives also sup¬
ported the Shiite right elsewhere, including in Saudi Arabia, where
they went beyond calls for democratic reform to demand the breakup
of Saudi Arabia and the creation of a Shiite state in Saudi Arabia’s
eastern province, where Shiites comprise a majority. In Gaza and the
West Bank, Ariel Sharon continued to toy with using Hamas, Islamic
Jihad, and Hezbollah to undercut the PLO, and in Z005 Hamas
emerged as the most powerful electoral force in Gaza. It seems that
even those who issue the most dire warnings about a titanic, Islam-
vs.-Christianity struggle readily manage to find accommodation with
right-wing Islamists.

Still, for purposes of public relations, the Bush administration has
been content to allow its Middle East policy to be portrayed as a clash
of civilizations. Some of its allies, especially members of the Christian
right, explicitly disparage Islam as an evil and violent religion. Pro¬
claiming that Islamic fundamentalists and bin Laden “hate our free¬
doms,” rather than U.S. policies, Bush has framed the war on terrorism
in the starkest terms, as a showdown between a God-fearing America
and an “axis of evil.” Despite the paradoxes of the war on terror, it is
safe to say that millions of Americans have been sold on the idea that
the Christian and Muslim worlds must battle each other to the end.

What happened between 1991 and zooi to transform Islam from
an ally to a malignant evil?

The easy answer is blame the shock that followed A 1 Qaeda’s zooi
attacks. But 9/11 was preceded by a decade of confusion in the United
States. To follow the transition from the New World Order to the clash

Clash of Civilizations? • 3

of civilizations, it is necessary to touch on the three crises of political
Islam during the nineties: Algeria, Egypt, and the rise of the Taliban.
The twelve years from the first Iraq war to the second was a period of
dizzying change for the Middle East. In Algeria, the Islamic right
plunged the country into a brutal civil war when it was denied the fruits
of an electoral victory in 1991. In Egypt, a terrorist underground, dis¬
creetly supported by the Muslim Brotherhood establishment, nearly
toppled Mubarak in the mid-1990s. And then, in Afghanistan, the
Pakistan-backed Taliban movement seized Kabul and imposed the
world’s strictest theocracy.

During these crises, the administrations of George Bush and Bill
Clinton failed to develop a coherent policy toward political Islam.
Even though the Muslim Brotherhood and right-wing political Islam
had seized control of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sudan—and
threatened Algeria, Egypt, Syria, and the Palestinian Authority—neither
Bush nor Clinton grasped the implications. The U.S. intelligence sys¬
tem and its vaunted counterterrorism machinery first missed the rise of
A 1 Qaeda and then, when the organization made its presence known
with a series of spectacular attacks in the late 1990s, failed to stop it.
Had they responded differently, had they realized the significance of
the Islamist movement then, and had U.S. intelligence analysts and
operatives more carefully tracked the violent offshoots of the Brother¬
hood and the Taliban, perhaps the events of 2001 and beyond would
not have occurred. Certainly, had the United States mapped out a
coherent policy toward Islamism during the 1990s, the dangerous
notion that America is facing a clash of civilizations would never have
gained traction.

The U.S. government, academia, and the world of policy-oriented
think tanks were divided over how to respond to the Islamic resur¬
gence at the end of the Cold War. Some wanted to develop a compre¬
hensive policy toward Islamism, others demanded that it be treated
on a country-by-country basis. Some wanted to confront the
Islamists, others to co-Opt or placate them. Pragmatists believed that
U.S. policy ought to stick with support for the existing regimes in
Cairo, Amman, Algiers, and elsewhere, but idealists supported the
idea that democracy had to flower in the region, even if the Islamists

3iz • Devil’s Game

were positioned to win elections. In the decade between 1991 and
zooi, U.S. policy toward the Islamic right was confused and contra¬
dictory. When not ignoring it, everyone agreed that Islamist terrorism
was bad, but that’s where the agreement stopped. The end of the U.S.-
Soviet struggle in the Middle East left the United States facing a region
in which political Islam was a major player. The Islamic right covered
a spectrum from the conservative Islamist regimes in Pakistan and
Saudi Arabia, to the radical regimes in Iran and Sudan, to extra-
governmental organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the
Taliban and Hezbollah, to radical-right terrorist cells such as A 1
Qaeda. Some were allies, some were vaguely threatening, some dan¬
gerously hostile. But how to tell friend from foe?

Three Crises in the 1990s

During the 1990s, the United States dealt uncertainly with flare-ups
by the Islamic right, first in Algeria, then in Egypt, and finally, once
again, in Afghanistan. In all three cases, the Islamists were able to
draw on battle-hardened veterans of the U.S.-sponsored Afghan
jihad, who applied the skills acquired in that war—including bomb¬
making, assassinations, and guerrilla-style attacks—in their struggle.

As the Soviet Union melted away, the Islamic right began to emerge
as a threat to stability, security, and U.S. interests. “One year after Mus¬
lim rebels ousted the communist government in Afghanistan, the long
Afghanistan war reverberates throughout the Islamic world, as veter¬
ans of the conflict take up arms to try to topple governments in Algeria,
Egypt, and other Arab countries,” the New York Times reported in
1:993. “Western diplomats and Arab officials say thousands of Islamic
militants engaging in clandestine, violent campaigns to overthrow gov¬
ernments in Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Jordan, Turkey and other
predominantly Muslim states currently use Afghanistan as a base.” 1
Imbued with a new consciousness and the belief that their insurgency
had defeated a superpower in Afghanistan, the Islamic right tested the
limits of its newfound power.

Clash of Civilizations? • 313

Algeria

The 1992-99 crisis in Algeria triggered the first government-wide
review of U.S. policy toward political Islam since the Iranian revolu¬
tion. And, during the seven-year civil war in Algeria, U.S. policy was
pulled this way and that by contradictory views—amid charges in
Paris and elsewhere in Europe that Washington was cozying up to the
Algerian Islamists in order to advance its own oil, gas, and industrial
interests in North Africa, at Europe’s expense.

The conundrum for the United States in Algeria was having to
choose between an Islamist insurgency that had gained an electoral
advantage and an entrenched, military-dominated but secular regime
that then suspended democracy in order to block the Islamists’ vic¬
tory. The issue was not whether the United States should intervene
directly—neither side in Algeria wanted that, and it was impractical
in any case. But Washington had to choose between affirming its sup¬
port for Algeria’s experiment in democracy, thus aligning it with a
radical Islamist movement, or siding with the Algerian army. Though
Washington looked for a middle ground, in the end, correctly, it toler¬
ated the army’s suppression of the Islamists. It was not an entirely
happy outcome. Yet had the United States condemned the Algerian
regime and thrown its diplomatic support to the Islamic right, the
consequences—in Algeria, and across the region—could have been
catastrophic.

The usual version of the Algerian crisis starts in 1989, with the
establishment of the Islamic Salvation Front, known by its French
abbreviation, FIS. In June 1990, the FIS won a resounding victory in
local elections. Then, in December 1991, FIS stunned the ruling party,
the National Liberation Front (FLN), winning 118 parliamentary
seats to the FLN’s 16. But before the second round of the vote, and
before the FIS took power, the army intervened to annul the vote,
arresting 10,000 FIS members and supporters. Denied its victory, the
FIS unleashed a campaign of terrorism. The president of Algeria was
assassinated, ministries were bombed, and hundreds of security offi¬
cials and policemen were killed by FIS gunmen. Civil war began.

314 • Devil’s Game

During the decade, a second organization called the Armed Islamic
Group (GIA) emerged, with a murky relationship to FIS. As the vio¬
lence intensified, Islamist vigilantes and shadowy paramilitary groups
carried out a campaign of horrifying slaughter, decimating villages,
massacring women and children. Tens of thousands died. 2

But the FIS did not emerge suddenly in 1989. As happened in Pak¬
istan, Egypt, Syria, Sudan, and Afghanistan during the Cold War, the
Islamic right built its power by battling the left and Algerian national¬
ists, especially on campuses. As in Afghanistan, where “the profes¬
sors” tied to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood built a secret society of
Islamists in Kabul in the 1960s and 1970s, in Algeria a host of profes¬
sors and teachers from Egypt, many of whom were members of the
Muslim Brotherhood and who had studied in Saudi Arabia’s Islamic
universities, were imported to teach Arabic to the francophone Algeri¬
ans. Mohammed al-Ghazali and Yusuf al-Qaradawi, two of Egypt’s
leading Islamic scholars who had fled to the Gulf, and who “were fel¬
low travelers of the Muslim Brothers and very much in favor with the
oil monarchies [and who encouraged] the ‘Islamic awakening’ at work”
in Algeria in the mid-1980s. 3 Throughout the 1980s, this cadre of
Islamic-right activists carried out a series of terrorist attacks against
the Algerian government. Many of the terrorists involved had been to
Afghanistan, or traveled back and forth to the jihad, and one of them,
Abdallah Anas, joined forces with bin Laden and Azzam in the pre-Al
Qaeda “Services Bureau.” When Azzam was assassinated, Anas took
over.

By the time the FIS was created, it had seized control of thousands
of mosques across the country and built a political-religious machine.
Like the Taliban, wherever FIS controlled municipal or provincial gov¬
ernments it instituted its version of Islamic cultural restrictions, forc¬
ing women to wear the veil, closing liquor and video stores, and often
persecuting those who did not go along. The FIS denounced Algeria’s
educated, secular middle classes and announced its intent to “ban
France from Algeria intellectually and ideologically.” 4 One month
before the December election that catapulted the FIS to victory, in
November 1991, a supposedly independent or renegade band of Alge¬
ria’s Islamists shocked the country with an outrageous act of terror:

Clash of Civilizations? • 315

Their first spectacular operation was a bloody assault on a frontier
post, in the course of which a group of “Afghan” veterans cut off
the heads of some wretched army conscripts. . . . The date was
carefully chosen to celebrate within four days the second anniver¬
sary of the martyrdom of Abdullah Azzam in Peshawar. It marked
the beginning of a jihad on Algerian soil . 5

Many Algerians feared that an Islamist government would insti¬
tute a reign of terror. Arab governments, including Egypt, Jordan,
Tunisia and Morocco, were alarmed, fearing that an Islamist-run
Algeria would be infectious. And for the United States, the Algerian
army’s action posed a delicate political problem: would Washington
endorse the army’s suppression of the election results, or defend the
FIS and the Islamic right?

For the Bush administration, preoccupied with the New World
Order, it was a puzzle. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker were
uneasy about the prospect of Islamism in Algeria, and they sided semi¬
officially with the Algerian army, adopting a position that a Senate
report called “something of a wink and a nod.” 6 Baker, explaining his
position later, said: “When I was at the State Department, we pursued a
policy of excluding the radical fundamentalists in Algeria even as we
recognized that this was somewhat at odds with our support of democ¬
racy.” 7 But many other U.S. officials, including CIA officers who had
contact with the FIS, did not agree with the Bush-Baker policy.

According to Robert Pelletreau, a former U.S. ambassador and sen¬
ior official at the State Department, there was serious disagreement
about the Bush-Baker policy of blocking the Islamists in Algeria. “In
the immediate aftermath of the military’s decision to block the election
result, we were very critical,” says Pelletreau. “Twenty-four hours
later, we reversed ourselves, and took a much more nuanced view.” 8

The Bush administration, uncertain about how to deal with the
Islamist challenge in Algiers, undertook a policy review. But it was a
hodgepodge, an effort to forge a consensus about how to deal with a
phenomenon little understood even by experts and about which politi¬
cians, top administration officials, and members of Congress were
utterly ignorant. Battle lines had not yet hardened, but at least two cur¬
rents had already started to emerge. One was an accommodationist

316 • Devil’s Game

point of view, whose adherents argued that the United States had noth¬
ing to fear from the Islamic right and that U.S. diplomats and CIA offi¬
cials ought to begin a worldwide effort to open contacts with the
Islamists who were willing, for the sake of dialogue, to eschew violence.
A second (still nascent) point of view was the clash-of-civilizations
school, which believed that the Muslim world was unalterably and fun¬
damentally hostile to the West. According to them, the enemy of the
United States was not just A 1 Qaeda, and not even right-wing political
Islam, but the very nature of the Muslim faith, the Koran, and Islamic
civilization as it had evolved over thirteen centuries. Throughout the
1990s, these two schools would gain momentum and confront each
other. Two leading academics would come to represent the two sides:
for the accommodationists, John Esposito of Georgetown University;
and for the clash of civilizations, Bernard Lewis of Princeton University.

In 1992, a decision was taken to have Edward Djerejian, then assis¬
tant secretary of state for Near East affairs, spearhead the effort to
invent a policy toward Islam, and he was chosen to deliver a speech in
June 1992, at Meridian House in Washington. “The State Department
came to me and said, ‘We need an Islam policy,’” says David Mack,
then Djerejian’s deputy. According to Mack, the speech was partly
designed to counter administration officials who were starting to argue
that the United States should treat Islam as a new global enemy. “Some
of the folks, especially Richard Schifter of the bureau of human rights,
were saying that Islam was dangerous, and of course this was the time
when the thesis of the clash of civilizations was starting to surface,”
says Mack. “Well, we pretty much managed to head it off. We had
a big, in-house conference, with people from [Near East affairs],
[the Bureau of Intelligence and Research], human rights, and a lot
of outside experts on Islam. And I drafted a speech for Djerejian.
We brought it to Jim Baker, who said, ‘Okay, fine, if you want to
do this.’ ” 9

Schifter, the assistant secretary of state for human rights, says that
he adheres to Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s distinction between “authoritar¬
ian” and “totalitarian” regimes. In the Algerian crisis, he says that he
supported the view that the United States ought to back the Algerian
army’s suppression of the Islamists. But for Schifter, and for many

Clash of Civilizations? • 317

hard-liners and neoconservatives, the issue was much larger than
Algeria. “What I saw was the development of a movement similar to
communism,” he says. “It’s the third totalitarian attack on democ¬
racy, after fascism and communism.” 10 According to Mack, Schifter
wanted a much tougher line in the speech than was adopted. “Schifter
and the bureau of human rights felt it was a soft-minded approach,”
says Mack. 11

In the end, Djerejian’s speech laid down some important markers,
but it also avoided crucial questions. Djerejian rejected out of hand
the clash-of-civilizations idea. “The U.S. government does not view
Islam as the new ‘ism’ confronting the West or threatening world
peace,” he said. “The Cold War is not being replaced with a new com¬
petition between Islam and the West. The Crusades have been over
for a long time. Americans recognize Islam as a historic civilizing
force among the many that have influenced and enriched our cul¬
ture.” But he went further:

Much attention is being paid to a phenomenon variously labeled
political Islam, the Islamic revival, or Islamic fundamentalism. . . .

In countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa, we
thus see groups or movements seeking to reform their societies in
keeping with Islamic ideals.. .. We detect no monolithic or coor¬
dinated international effort behind these movements. What we do
see are believers living in different countries placing renewed
emphasis on Islamic principles and governments accommodating
Islamist political activity to varying degrees and in different ways.

Djerejian went on to add that the United States wanted free elections
and enhanced civil rights in the region, but said, in an obvious refer¬
ence to the crisis in Algeria: “We are suspect of those who would use
the democratic process to come to power, only to destroy that very
process in order to retain power and political dominance.” And he
said that the United States was opposed to those who engage in vio¬
lence, repression, or “religious and political confrontation.” 12

In other forums, Djerejian spoke favorably, but vaguely, about
“moderate Islamists,” although he failed to define what he meant by
“moderate.” 13 While Djerejian condemned terrorism and noted that

the United States has good relations with countries “whose systems of
government are firmly grounded in Islamic principles,” such as Saudi
Arabia and Pakistan, he completely avoided any discussion of the
Islamic right itself and its manifestations. “Unfortunately,” Gerges
wrote, “the Meridian address did not clarify the Bush administra¬
tion’s approach toward those very Islamist groups.”

If Djerejian’s speech failed as an outline of American policy
toward political Islam, it worked well as a more particular response
to events in Algeria, where the United States tacitly supported the
army’s suspension of democracy. But the situation went from bad to
worse, as Algeria was engulfed in a cycle of violent attacks and coun¬
terattacks pitting the army against battle-hardened jihad veterans.

In 1993, the Clinton administration tried to encourage a dialogue
between the Algerian authorities and elements of the Islamist opposi¬
tion. But Western Europe, particularly France, accused the United
States of using its dialogue with the Algerian Islamists to secure a
political and commercial advantage in Algeria in the wake of what
many expected would be an Islamic revolution. “The French attacked
American motives for meeting with Islamists, suspecting the U.S. gov¬
ernment of favoring the FIS over the Algerian regime,” according to
Gerges, who reports that Charles Pasqua, the French interior minister,
accused Washington of harboring “fundamentalist terrorists.” 14 That
was a reference to Anwar Haddam, the FIS representative in Wash¬
ington, who maintained on-and-off contacts with U.S. officials in the
early 1990s. “The French wanted us to expel the FIS guy here,” says
Pelletreau, who served under Clinton as assistant secretary of state for
Near East affairs. “But we never had any call to expel him.” 15

The loudest voice calling for a reconciliation with Algeria’s
Islamists was none other than Graham Fuller, the former CIA analyst
who had worked with Casey to build a justification for the 1984-86
Iran-contra approach to Teheran. Then ensconced at the RAND Cor¬
poration, Fuller wrote a book entitled Algeria: The Next Fundamen¬
talist State? In it, he virtually endorsed FIS as Algeria’s next rulers and
urged the United States not to worry. “The FIS is unlikely to present a
massive challenge to U.S. and Western interests,” wrote Fuller. “Is the
United States willing to inaugurate democratic processes in which the

Clash of Civilizations? • 319

Islamists stand a very good chance of gaining a significant voice in
power?” 16 Fuller admitted that FIS would suppress women’s rights
and spread the gospel abroad, “emboldening other Islamist move¬
ments in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Morocco [with] asylum, financial
aid, even weapons.” 17 But he argued that its momentum was unstop¬
pable. “It will be very difficult, if not almost impossible, to stop
Islamist forces,” said Fuller. “Islamist governments in the Middle East
are likely to multiply in the years ahead, taking numerous different
forms. They, and the West, are going to have to learn to live with each
other.” 18 Fuller argued that FIS “is likely to welcome U.S. private sec¬
tor investment in Algeria and to undertake close commercial relations
with the United States.... The FIS has long had good ties with Saudi
Arabia and received a great deal of Saudi funding until recent
years.” 19 Fuller’s monograph was written for and sponsored by the
U.S. Army.

To Fuller, the FIS movement in Algeria was a grand experiment,
and one that the United States ought not to turn away from—and his
views were certainly influential during the Clinton administration.
But many Algerians, especially veterans of the revolution that ended
in 1962, were not so ready to abandon secularism and socialism for
free-market Islamism. “It’s fine for others to talk about conducting a
grand political experiment in Algeria,” said Maloud Brahimi, former
head of Algeria’s League of Human Rights. “But what do we look
like—white rats?” 20

Egypt

On the heels of the Algerian explosion, a dire Islamist threat to Egypt
emerged in the 1990s, creating another dilemma for the Clinton
administration. Was Egypt, the original home of the Muslim Brother¬
hood, about to fall to an Islamist revolution? And if so, what should
U.S. policy be? The Bush administration’s 1992 review, and the task
force that Djerejian created, did not provide much guidance. Unlike
Algeria, which after all was on the periphery of the Middle East,
Egypt was its very heart—and President Mubarak a staunch ally.

In the 1990s, Egyptian Islamists waged an assault on the Egyptian

3 2.o • Devil’s Game

regime strong enough to threaten the country’s stability. Hundreds of
people were killed by armed militants, including military and police
officers, government officials, and leading Egyptian writers and intel¬
lectuals. Despite heavy repression after the death of Sadat in 1981,
and periodic crackdowns in the 1980s, the Brotherhood had made
steady gains, especially in civil society. The organization won control
of many of Egypt’s professional associations—doctors, lawyers, engi¬
neers, and, of course, student groups, its traditional stronghold. In
1993, the Sunday Times of London reported that the CIA issued a
National Intelligence Estimate warning that “Islamic fundamentalist
terrorists will continue to make gains across Egypt, leading to the
eventual collapse of the Mubarak government.” 21

James Woolsey was the CIA director at the time. “We were very wor¬
ried, and as I remember we offered Egypt whatever assistance we could
reasonably provide,” he says. “Generally speaking, there was a substan¬
tial amount of support in the U.S. government, certainly in the intelli¬
gence community, for Mubarak doing whatever he had to do to prevent
an Islamist takeover.” 22 The United States provided security assistance
to Egypt’s police and intelligence service. “In Egypt we’d trained a Spe¬
cial Operations group among the Egyptian authorities, with the help of
the CIA,” says Edward W. Walker, the U.S. ambassador from 1994 to
1997. “They were used in cleaning up a few of these cells.” 23

The truth, however, is that even though the United States cooper¬
ated with Egypt to a degree in combating Islamist terrorism in Egypt,
that cooperation was far less than it ought to have been, for several
reasons. First, within the U.S. government, there was a persistent
belief that the Muslim Brotherhood was a potentially useful partner
in efforts to bring democracy to Egypt, and throughout the 1990s that
belief undercut U.S. assistance to Egypt’s security and intelligence
agencies. Second, the Mubarak regime’s often very heavy-handed
repression of its opponents, including arrests of all manner of dissi¬
dents and the use of torture against prisoners, made the United States
skittish about helping Cairo. Both Woolsey and Walker say that the
United States had strong reservations about the harshness of Egyptian
methods. “They were very aggressive, more aggressive than we were
willing to support. Some of the people they seized were found shot

Clash of Civilizations? • 321

with their hands tied,” says Walker. “We had to stop the program.” 24
And third, there was sharp disagreement among U.S. intelligence and
diplomatic officials about the nature of the Brotherhood itself: Was
the organization cooperating with the radical, openly terrorist sub¬
groups like A 1 Gamaa or Islamic Jihad, whose leaders included
Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s future chief aide? Or was the
Brotherhood a moderate, even establishment group whose rhetorical
commitment to democracy could be relied upon?

For Mubarak, at least, the answer was provided by Algeria. The
Egyptian leader watched in horror as that country plunged into civil
war, and he vowed not to allow the Islamists in Egypt to gain enough
strength to mount a frontal challenge to his regime. Beginning in the
1980s and continuing through September 11, 2001, Mubarak criti¬
cized the United States repeatedly for its failure to take action against
the Islamic right in its bases in Western Europe and in the United
States itself. Those included overt Muslim Brotherhood organiza¬
tional units in London and Germany, Said Ramadan’s Islamic Center
in Geneva, New York-New Jersey cells such as the one affiliated with
blind sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, the ringleader of the 1993 attack
on the World Trade Center, and other U.S.-based cells, mosques, and
Islamic centers. Until 2001, no concerted U.S. effort to investigate
these networks was undertaken.

“Neither Europe nor the United States were cooperating with
Egypt, not until 9/11,” says Abdel Moneim Said of the Al Ahram
Center in Cairo:

Omar Abdel Rahman was being harbored in the United States,
having escaped in between trials and going to Sudan. The United
States was not cooperating. They’d say to us, “You are not a
democracy, you are not making reforms.” So they were creating a
worldwide terrorist network, and we were practically on our own
during this period. We wanted the United States to give these guys
to us, to sabotage their propaganda networks, to sabotage their
financial networks, to disturb their connection with the trouble
spots in Afghanistan. We tried several times to get the United
States involved, first in 1986, when President Mubarak called for
an international conference on terrorism, announcing it at a meeting

Devil’s Game

of the European parliament in Strasbourg. We knew a lot by then:
that the international centers for this movement were in London,
New Jersey, Frankfurt, with other centers in Hamburg, Geneva,
Copenhagen. They were not at all sensitive to this in Europe in the
1980s and 1990s. 25

The two U.S. ambassadors to Egypt during this period had con¬
flicting views about the Muslim Brotherhood. Walker, who served
from 1994 to 1997, was skeptical of the Muslim Brotherhood and
mostly sympathetic to Mubarak’s crackdown. Pelletreau, who served
in Cairo from 1991 to 1993, was more apt to see the Brotherhood in
a favorable light—even if it attracted the attention of Egypt’s intel¬
ligence service. “Ned [Walker] and I had different policies,” says
Pelletreau. “I felt we had to be talking to members of the Muslim
Brotherhood. I did [talk to them].” Pelletreau’s contacts with the
Brotherhood angered Mubarak. “At one point I received a very
strong message from the [Egyptian] government, demanding that 1
break off those contacts. I said that I would not. I didn’t meet with
them myself, but people from the political section did. We developed
people as contacts who were inside the movement. But in Egypt you
have to be very careful, because the Egyptians have a very, very effec¬
tive counterintelligence capability.” 26

Pelletreau recalls a visit to Washington by Mubarak in which the
Egyptian president lost his temper over U.S. inaction:

Soon afterward, Mubarak came to Washington, and the secretary
of state invited him to lunch. Warren Christopher asked Mubarak
about the best way to deal with the Islamists. I’ll never forget what
happened next. Mubarak sat up sharply, rigidly. “This is not a
new phenomenon in Egypt,” he said, getting angry. “These people
killed my predecessor!” Then he raised this huge fist, and he
slammed it down on the table hard, and everything on the table
jumped and rattled. Bang! “When they come out, we have to hit
them!” 27

But Pelletreau says: “I told Mubarak that it was the right policy to
crack down on terrorists, but not on the Muslim Brotherhood.” The

Clash of Civilizations? • 32.3

question of how to tell the difference was something that U.S. intelli¬
gence could not answer, according to U.S. diplomats and intelligence
officers. The line between the overtly terrorist organizations and the
more establishment Muslim Brotherhood was not a clear one. The
Brotherhood ran clinics, social welfare centers, and mosques, had a
powerful presence among professional groups, and set up a semi¬
official political party.

According to Pelletreau and Walker, the link between the official
Muslim Brotherhood and the underground terrorist cells was prob¬
ably organized through independent mosques and Islamic centers in
Egypt run by “emirs.” They apparently maintained a membership in
the Brotherhood, which was a secret society, while giving encourage¬
ment, support, and theological justification to the terrorists. “The
Egyptians claimed that they discovered some links, and I guess you
could say that the whole line became blurred between the Muslim
Brotherhood and the armed groups,” says Pelletreau. “A lot of inde¬
pendent emirs start popping up here and there, in various parts of
Cairo, and some of the clerics develop a group of followers. They
don’t usually engage in acts of violence themselves, but they can con¬
done violence. Say, someone will come to them and say, ‘Is it permit¬
ted to do such and such?’ and they will say, ‘Yes, according to
Islam.’ ”

Walker, who followed Pelletreau, had a somewhat different view.
“We’d realized it was a much bigger problem,” he says. “We were
very close to the Europeans in cooperating to roll up these threats. We
created flow charts of how these groups interacted with each other. A
lot of the leaders were in places like Italy and London, and we’d coop¬
erate by intercepting communications back into Egypt, and then the
Egyptians would roll them up.” But, Walker says, Egypt was not sat¬
isfied with U.S. and European cooperation. “I can’t count the number
of times that Mubarak yelled at me about how the British were giving
the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists safe haven,” he says. “In
Egypt, everybody seemed to see it as a problem, but they couldn’t
convince us.” 28

Like Pelletreau, Walker maintained a relationship with the Muslim

314 ' Devil’s Game

Brotherhood. “When I was there in Egypt we engaged with members
of the Muslim Brotherhood, as individuals, on the level of the
embassy political counselor. But it was an illegal organization, so it
was sensitive. The Muslim Brotherhood was more acquiescent than
some of the other groups, such as Islamic Jihad. The Muslim Brother¬
hood had a lot of sympathy from some people in Washington, who
held it should be accommodated,” he says. “For many of those who
support bringing democracy to the region, the Muslim Brotherhood
was seen as a legitimate domestic opposition force.” Walker, and
some CIA officers, didn’t agree. “Terrorism had two sources. One was
the Palestinians, and one, the Muslim Brotherhood. They had a
checkered history. One day you’re friends, and then they try to assas¬
sinate you,” Walker says. “Our intelligence people saw it as a kind of
international fraternity of terrorists. Some specific mosques were
involved. It is not a coherent organizational structure. But if someone
comes along, they help them.” 29

Mubarak repeatedly slammed the United States in public, too,
especially after the Islamists mounted an assassination attempt against
him in 1995, murdered several Egyptian government officials abroad,
and bombed Egypt’s embassies. To Americans who urged him to coop¬
erate with moderate Islamists, including the Muslim Brotherhood,
Mubarak dripped with scorn. “Who are the moderates?” he said.
“Nobody has succeeded in defining them for me.” He ridiculed the
effectiveness of dialogue with the Islamists. “Dialogue with whom? It
will be the dialogue of the deaf. We had a dialogue with them for four¬
teen years, and every time we engaged them, they became stronger.
Dialogue is old-fashioned. The ones who are asking for dialogue do
not know [Islamists]. We know them better.” 30

The shadow of Iran’s 1979 revolution haunted Mubarak. Again
and again, he accused the United States of conducting secret talks
with the Brotherhood. “You think you can correct the mistakes that
you made in Iran, where you had no contact with the Ayatollah
Khomeini and his fanatic groups before they seized power,” Mubarak
said. “But, I can assure you, these groups will never take over this
country, and they will never be on good terms with the United
States.” 31 To a large extent, Mubarak was right that many U.S. offi-

Clash of Civilizations? • 325

cials expected that the Islamists would seize control of Egypt, and so
they sought an inside track with the Islamic right. Foreshadowing the
neoconservative dreams after 2001 of reshaping the Middle East and
imposing some new democratic order there, an official at the National
Security Council said in early 1995 that Egypt’s Islamists were the
wave of the future:

The existing Middle Eastern regimes, said this official, are bound to
disappear in the future because change is inevitable; one of Wash¬
ington’s major policy objectives is to manage the transition to a new
Middle Eastern political order with minimal cost. The United States
views Islamists as integral players among the broad social forces
operating in the region. Thus, to survive, the dominant ruling elites
will have to broaden their social base by integrating Islamists into
the political field. This reality explains the rationale for the Clinton
administration’s early decision to maintain a discreet dialogue with
the Algerian and Egyptian Islamists. 32

Neither Algeria’s government nor Mubarak thought much of that
“reality,” however, and they acted to crush the Islamist insurgency.
Following the 1995 assassination attempt, Mubarak launched an
assault against the Muslim Brotherhood that recalled the 1954 and
1964-66 crackdowns by Nasser. Hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood
leaders were arrested, their institutions were dismantled, professional
syndicates closed, and show trials held. Some U.S. officials predicted
that the repression would backfire, but instead, during the second half
of the 1990s, the Islamic right in Egypt retreated with one glaring
exception: a series of spectacular terrorist acts directed against
tourists in Egypt in 1997. The Islamic right in Egypt had, once again,
been beaten into submission. But it did not go away. Its violence-
oriented underground scattered, or went into hiding. Its moderate-
seeming ideologues, preachers, and politicians sought alliance with
Egypt’s democratic opposition, declaring their support for elections to
replace Mubarak. Many U.S. government officials, sympathetic Ori¬
entalists, and think tanks—from the Brookings Institution to the U.S.
Institute for Peace—insisted that the Muslim Brotherhood was a
promising partner in a reformed Egypt.

316 • Devil’s Game

The Taliban

The third Islamist eruption to confront U.S. policy makers was the
meteoric rise of the Taliban in war-shattered Afghanistan.

The most incisive account of the founding, growth and victory of
the Taliban is Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fun¬
damentalism in Central Asia. A veteran Pakistani reporter, Rashid
spent years covering Afghanistan and Pakistan’s ISI. According to
Rashid, from the start the Taliban had strong support not only from
Saudi Arabia, which financed it, and from Pakistan, whose ISI intelli¬
gence service was the primary force behind the Taliban’s conquest of
warlord-dominated Afghanistan, but from the United States as well.
“Between 1994 and 1996, the U.S.A. supported the Taliban politically
through its allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, essentially because
Washington viewed the Taliban as anti-Iranian, anti-Shia, and pro-
Western,” he wrote. “Between 1995 and 1997 U.S. support was even
more driven because of its backing for the Unocal project [for an
energy pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan!.” Many U.S.
diplomats, he wrote, “saw them as messianic do-gooders—like born-
again Christians from the American Bible Belt.” 33

The U.S. support for the Taliban was strategic. It precisely echoed
Brzezinski’s “arc of Islam” policy and Casey’s dream of using Islam to
penetrate the Soviet Union. Even in the post-Cold War world, the
United States sought to gain advantage in oil-rich Central Asia, and
throughout the 1990s Washington jockeyed for position. In the
American view, its allies were Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and its com¬
petitors were Russia, China, India, and Iran. A 1996 State Depart¬
ment memo, written just before the Taliban captured Kabul, warned
that Russia, Iran, and India—all of which feared Sunni fundamental¬
ism in the region—would back an anti-Taliban force in Afghanistan, 34
and that is precisely what did happen, as the Ahmed Shah Massoud-
led Northern Alliance emerged in the late 1990s as the chief opponent
of the Taliban’s fanatical regime. (Ironically, it would be the Northern
Alliance that would be the chief ally of the United States when, after
the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the United
States invaded Afghanistan.)

Clash of Civilizations? • 32.7

Graham Fuller, in The Future of Political Islam, accurately described
how the Taliban threatened nations competing with the United States
in Central Asia:

Important external forces that shared a stake in Afghan events
were disturbed at the implications of a Taliban takeover: Iran
because the Taliban were fiercely anti-Shiite and treated the Shiite
Hazara population with extreme harshness; and Russia, Uzbek¬
istan, and Tajikistan because they feared the Taliban would turn
their sights toward expanding Islamist movements north into cen¬
tral Asia. India, too, geopolitically sought to deny Pakistan strate¬
gic dominance in Afghanistan, which a Taliban victory would
represent. Washington was initially neutral and hoped, with Paki¬
stani urging, that the Taliban had no anti-U.S. agenda, could at
last unify the country so long wracked by civil war; could facili¬
tate the passage of Turkmen gas pipelines through Afghanistan to
the Indian Ocean, skirting Iran; could impose control over the
rampant poppy production, and crack down on the presence of
Muslim guerrillas and training camps in the country since the anti-
Soviet jihad. 35

Cold War or not, the United States explicitly stated its intention to
challenge Russian hegemony in Central Asia and Afghanistan. U.S.
policy, said Sheila Haslin, an NSC official, was to “promote the inde¬
pendence of these oil-rich countries, to in essence break Russia’s
monopoly control over the transportation of oil from that region, and
frankly, to promote Western energy security through diversity of sup¬
ply.” 36 Unocal, the prime backer of plans for a pipeline to guarantee
that diversity, hired numerous former U.S. officials to promote its
scheme, from Henry Kissinger to Zalmay Khalilzad, the future U.S.
ambassador in Kabul. Khalilzad, a specialist at the RAND Corpora¬
tion, said in 1996: “The Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. style
of fundamentalism practiced by Iran—it is closer to the Saudi model.
The group upholds a mix of traditional Pashtun values and an ortho¬
dox interpretation of Islam.” 37

Besides Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, two other U.S. allies joined
in the regional strategy for ousting Russia and containing Iran:
Israel and Turkey. In the 1990s, Turkey—which was increasingly

32.8 • Devil’s Game

falling under the spell of its own Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamist
movement—was being encouraged by Washington to extend its influ¬
ence into Central Asia, where a large Turkic population was, they
thought, ready to respond to a Turkish-led bloc stretching from the
Bosporus to China.

At exactly the same time that Osama bin Laden was setting up
headquarters in Afghanistan, after being asked to leave Sudan in 1996,
the Taliban leaders who hosted him, and who were becoming increas¬
ingly dependent on bin Laden’s financial support, were crisscrossing
the United States, meeting U.S. officials, oil men, and academics.
Protests against the Taliban from women’s groups, who opposed the
Taliban’s hateful treatment of Afghan women, were (at first) over¬
looked by the Clinton administration and by Unocal, who preferred
to see the Taliban as a mini-version of Saudi Arabia’s ruling elite.
“The Taliban,” said a State Department official, “will probably
develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no
parliament, and lots of sharia law. We can live with that.” 38

During the U.S.-Taliban era of cooperation from 1994 to 1998—
which ended with the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa, when
the United States targeted not only bin Laden but his Afghan allies as
well—a key Unocal consultant was a University of Nebraska academic
named Thomas Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghanistan Stud¬
ies there. During and after the Afghan jihad, Gouttierre’s center secured
more than $60 million in federal grants for “educational” programs in
Afghanistan and Pakistan. Although the funding for Gouttierre’s work
was funneled through the State Department’s Agency for International
Development, the CIA was its sponsor. And it turned out that Gout¬
tierre’s education program consisted of blatant Islamist propaganda,
including the creation of children’s textbooks in which young Afghanis
were taught to count by enumerating dead Russian soldiers and adding
up Kalashnikov rifles, all of it imbued with Islamic fundamentalist rhet¬
oric. The Taliban liked Gouttierre’s work so much that they continued
to use the textbooks he created, and when a delegation of Taliban offi¬
cials visited the United States in 1997 they made a special stop in Omaha
to pay homage to Gouttierre. In 1999, another Taliban delegation,
which included military commanders with ties to bin Laden and A 1

Clash of Civilizations? • 329

Qaeda, was escorted by Gouttierre on a tour of Mount Rushmore. 39
“You sit down with them and they are relatively regular Joes,” said
Gouttierre, according to the Omaha World Herald . 40 When the United
States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, one of its tasks was to purge and
replace Gouttierre’s Taliban-endorsed (and CIA-funded) Islamists text¬
books in the schools. “The primers,” the Washington Post reported,
“were filled with talk of jihad.” 41

A Clash of Civilizations?

By the end of the 1990s, a tense stalemate existed respecting the
power of the Islamic right in the Middle East and south Asia. In Egypt
and Algeria, the Islamists had been beaten into submission, but they
maintained a low-level presence. In Afghanistan, Iran, and Sudan they
held the high ground, controlling radical Islamic republics under dic¬
tatorial regimes. In Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the Islamists exercised
extraordinary power in alliance with ruling elites, although the royal
family in Saudi Arabia and the army in Pakistan were increasingly
edgy about their respective deals with the devil. Islamism was making
unprecedented gains in Turkey, whose seventy-year secular tradition
reaching back to Kemal Ataturk was threatened by right-wing
Islamists tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Naqshbandi Sufi
secret society.

In the United States, from the Iranian revolution until the late
1990s, almost no one gave a thought to the problems in the Middle
East caused by Islamism. Even that violent subset of Islamism—
namely, Islamic terrorist groups—was essentially ignored, according
to Woolsey and other CIA officials, with the exception of Hezbollah.
The CIA and U.S. counterterrorism officials finally responded to a
series of wake-up calls (the 1996 destruction of the U.S. military’s
Khobar Towers facility in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 car bombing of U.S.
embassies in Kenya and - Tanzania, and the 2000 attack on the U.S.S.
Cole off the coast of Yemen) by creating a series of task forces dedi¬
cated to Osama bin Laden, A 1 Qaeda, and its allies, who became Pub¬
lic Enemy No. 1.

33 ° • Devil’s Game

But the U.S. effort to find and eliminate bin Laden was laughably
incompetent. A $27 billion U.S. intelligence system, with perhaps
100,000 employees spread among a dozen agencies, with a vast array
of satellites, surveillance devices, spies, agents, and informers, failed
to find him. At the same time, however, countless journalists from the
United States and Europe, including television reporters from CNN
and Frontline, found him with ease and conducted lengthy inter¬
views. Would-be terrorists with questionable bona fides, such as John
Walker Lindh, managed to get close to bin Laden, but the CIA
couldn’t replicate the feat. Cruise missile attacks against alleged bin
Laden hideouts in Afghanistan failed miserably, and attacks on facili¬
ties in Sudan allegedly tied to A 1 Qaeda efforts to produce weapons
of mass destruction managed to destroy that country’s only factory
for producing medicines. A scheme to kidnap bin Laden, meticulously
planned, was aborted.

Then, on September 11, 2001, those who believed in the clash of
civilizations got the opening they needed. Their views, until then con¬
sidered odd at best and extremist at worst, won a far wider following.
And the Bush administration, while not endorsing the idea of a struggle
between Christianity and Islam, seized the notion of a clash of civiliza¬
tions to propel the United States into an unprecedented expansion of its
imperial presence in the Middle East.

Lewis and Huntington

Until that date, the two men most responsible for popularizing the idea
of a clash of civilizations, Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington,
were regarded as curiosities by mainstream national security and for¬
eign policy experts. Their Ivy League credentials and access to presti¬
gious publications such as Foreign Affairs, and the edgy radicalism of
their theories, guaranteed that they would generate controversy, and
they did. But few took their ideas seriously, except for a scattered
array of neoconservatives, who, in the 1990s, resided on the fringe
themselves. The Lewis-Huntington thesis was hit by a withering salvo
of counterattacks from many journalists, academics, and foreign pol¬
icy gurus.

Clash of Civilizations? • 3 3

Samuel Huntington, whose controversial book The Clash of Civi¬
lizations amounted to a neoconservative declaration of war, wrote that
the enemy was not the Islamic right, but the religion of the Koran itself:

The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamental¬
ism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced
of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferi¬
ority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the
U.S. Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization
whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and
believe that their superior, if declining power imposes on them the
obligation to extend that culture throughout the world . 42

What followed from Huntington’s manifesto, of course, was that the
Judeo-Christian world and the Muslim world were locked in a state
of permanent cultural war. The terrorists—such as A 1 Qaeda, which
was still taking shape when Huntington’s book came out—were not
just a gang of fanatics with a political agenda, but the manifestation of
a civilizational conflict. Like a modern oracle of Delphi, Huntington
suggested that the gods had foreordained the collision, and mere
humans could not stop it.

Huntington acknowledged—without mentioning the role of the
United States—that Islam had been a potent force against the left dur¬
ing the Cold War. “At one time or another during the Cold War many
governments, including those of Algeria, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, and
Israel, encouraged and supported Islamists as a counter to communist
or hostile nationalist movements,” he wrote. “At least until the Gulf
War, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states provided massive funding to
the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist groups in a variety of coun¬
tries.” 43 But he had a neat explanation of how the alliance between
the West and the Islamists unraveled. “The collapse of communism
removed a common enemy of the West and Islam and left each the
perceived major threat to the other,” he wrote. 44 “In the 1990s many
saw a ‘civilizational cold war’ again developing between Islam and
the West.” 45 Huntington, who is not an expert on Islam, observed a
“connection between Islam and militarism,” 46 and he asserted: “Islam
has from the start been a religion of the sword and it glorifies military

332- ' Devil’s Game

virtues.” 47 Just to make sure that no one could miss his point, he
quoted an unnamed U.S. Army officer who said, “The southern
tier”—i.e., the border between Europe and the Middle East—“is rap¬
idly becoming NATO’s new front line.” 48

Huntington quotes his guru on matters Islamic, Bernard Lewis, in
order to prove that Islam presents an existential threat to the very sur¬
vival of the West:

“For almost a thousand years,” Bernard Lewis observes, “from
the first Moorish landing in Spain to the second Turkish siege of
Vienna, Europe was under constant threat from Islam.” Islam is
the only civilization which has put the survival of the West in
doubt, and it has done that at least twice. 49

How exactly the weak, impoverished, and fragmented countries of
the Middle East and south Asia could “put the survival of the West in
doubt” was not explained. But it was a thesis that Bernard Lewis had
been refining since the 1950s.

Lewis, a former British intelligence officer and longtime supporter
of the Israeli right, has been a propagandist and apologist for impe¬
rialism and Israeli expansionism for more than half a century. He first
used the term “clash of civilizations” in 1956, in an article that
appeared in the Middle East Journal, in which he endeavored to
explain “the present anti-Western mood of the Arab states.” Lewis
asserted then that Arab anger was not the result of the “Palestine
problem,” nor was it related to the “struggle against imperialism.”
Instead, he argued, it was “something deeper and vaster”:

What we are seeing in our time is not less than a clash between
civilizations—more specifically, a revolt of the world of Islam
against the shattering impact of Western civilization which, since
the 18 th century, has dislocated and disrupted the old order. . . .

The resulting anger and frustration are often generalized against
Western civilization as a whole. 50

It was a theme he would return to again and again. By blaming anti-
Western feeling in the Arab world on vast historical forces, Lewis

Clash of Civilizations? • 333

absolved the West of its neocolonial post-World War II oil grab, its sup¬
port for the creation of a Zionist state on Arab territory, and its ruthless
backing of corrupt monarchies in Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Jordan, Saudi
Arabia, and the Gulf. In his classic 1964 book, The Middle East and the
West, he repeated his nostrum: “We [must] view the present discontents
of the Middle East not as a conflict between states or nations, but as a
clash of civilizations.” 51 Lewis explicitly made the point that the United
States must not seek to curry favor with the Arabs by pressuring Israel
to make peace. “Some speak wistfully of how easy it would all be if
only Arab wishes could be met—this being usually interpreted to mean
those wishes that can be satisfied at the expense of other parties,” i.e.,
Israel. 52 Instead, he demanded, the United States should simply aban¬
don the Arabs. “The West should ostentatiously disengage from Arab
politics, and in particular, from inter-Arab politics,” wrote Lewis. “It
should seek to manufacture no further Arab allies.” 53 Why seek alli¬
ance with nations whose very culture and religion make them unalter¬
ably opposed to Western civilization?

Over several decades, Lewis played a critical role as professor,
mentor, and guru to two generations of Orientalists, academics, U.S.
and British intelligence specialists, think tank denizens, and assorted
neoconservatives, while earning the scorn of countless other academic
specialists on Islam who considered Lewis hopelessly biased in favor
of a Zionist, anti-Muslim point of view. A British Jew born in 1916,
Lewis spent five years during World War II as a Middle East operative
for British intelligence, and then settled at the University of London. 54
In 1974 he migrated from London to Princeton, where he developed
ties to people who would later lead the fledgling neoconservative
movement. “Lewis became [Senator Henry] Jackson’s guru, more or
less,” said Richard Perle, 55 a former top Pentagon official who, as
chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, was the most
prominent advocate for war with Iraq in 2003, and who is a longtime
acolyte of Lewis’s. Lewis also became a regular visitor to the Moshe
Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, where he developed close links
to Ariel Sharon.

By the 1980s, Lewis was hobnobbing with top Department of
Defense officials. According to Pat Lang, the former DIA official,

334 ‘ Devil’s Game

Bernard Lewis was frequently called down from Princeton to provide
tutorials to Andrew Marshall, director of the Office of Net Assess¬
ments, an in-house Pentagon think tank. 56 Another of Lewis’s stu¬
dents was Harold Rhode, a polyglot Middle East expert who went to
work in the Pentagon and stayed for more than two decades, serving
as Marshall’s deputy. Over the past twenty years, Lewis has served as
the in-house consultant on Islam and the Middle East to a host of
neoconservatives, including Perle, Rhode, and Michael Ledeen. Asked
whom he drew on for expertise during his tenure as CIA director,
James Woolsey says, “We had people come in and give seminars. I
remember talking to Bernard Lewis.” 57

Although Lewis maintained a veneer of academic objectivity, and
though many scholars acknowledged Lewis’s credentials as a primary-
source historian on the history of the Ottoman Empire, Lewis aban¬
doned all pretense of academic detachment in the 1990s. In 1998, he
officially joined the neocon camp, signing a letter demanding regime
change in Iraq from the ad hoc Committee for Peace and Security in
the Gulf, co-signed by Perle, Martin Peretz of The New Republic, and
future Bush administration officials, including Paul Wolfowitz, David
Wurmser, and Dov Zakheim. He continued to work closely with
neoconservative think tanks, and in the period after September 11,
zoo 1, Lewis was ubiquitous, propagating his view that Islam was
unalterably opposed to the West. Two weeks after 9/11, Perle invited
Lewis and Ahmed Chalabi to speak before the influential Defense
Policy Board, inaugurating a two-year effort by neoconservatives to
prove a nonexistent link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam
Hussein. Chalabi, a friend of Perle’s and Lewis’s since the 1980s, led
an exile Iraqi opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, and
Chalabi was responsible for feeding reams of misleading information
to U.S. intelligence officers that helped the Bush administration exag¬
gerate the extent of the threat posed to the United States by Iraq.

Less than a month after Lewis and Chalabi’s appearance, the Pen¬
tagon created a secret rump intelligence unit led by Wurmser, which
later evolved into the Office of Special Plans (OSP). It was organized
by Rhode and Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy.
“Rhode is kind of the Mikhail Suslov of the neocon movement,” says

Clash of Civilizations? • 335

Lang, referring to the late chief ideologue for the former Soviet Com¬
munist Party. “He’s the theoretician.” 58 It was Rhode and Feith’s OSP,
under neocon Abram Shulsky, which manufactured false intelligence
that blamed Iraq for ties to A 1 Qaeda. And it was the OSP which cre¬
ated talking-points papers for Vice President Cheney, Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and other top Bush administration offi¬
cials claiming that Iraq had extensive stockpiles of chemical and bio¬
logical weapons, long-range missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, and a
well-developed nuclear program. 59 Chalabi’s falsified intelligence fed
directly into the OSP, from whence it ended up in speeches by Cheney,
Rumsfeld, and other top Bush administration officials. On the eve of
the Iraq war, Lewis, who was close to Cheney, had a private dinner
with the vice president to discuss plans for the war in Iraq, 60 and, in
2003, Lewis dedicated his book The Crisis of Islam “To Harold
Rhode.”

The War on Terror

In going to war, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, and in declaring
the start of a global war on terrorism with no end in sight, President
Bush was careful not to embrace fully the Lewis-Huntington theory of
a civilizational clash. In speech after speech—and despite an initial
clumsy reference to the campaign in the Middle East as a “crusade”—
the president insisted that the United States was engaged in a war
against terrorists, not a war against the people of the Koran. In fact,
however, Bush’s war on terrorism is merely an excuse to implement a
radical new approach to the Middle East and Central Asia. It is not a
policy toward Islam, or Islamic fundamentalism, or even toward ter¬
rorism, Islamic or otherwise.

From the start, the president’s response to 9/11 displayed a broad
imperial vision. He imagined a domino-like series of regime changes
in the Middle East, tied to an expanded U.S. military and political
presence in the region: First the Taliban, then Saddam Hussein, then
regimes in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and beyond would fall before
the onslaught of an imperial democracy. The Bush administration
was heavily influenced by neoconservatives inside and outside

336 • Devil’s G

who preached the gospel of sweeping regional change. Inside were
Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, Marshall, Wurmser, and Shulsky, along with
other key officials in the Pentagon, such as Michael Rubin and
William Luti, Lewis Libby in Vice President Cheney’s office, John
Bolton at the State Department, Elliott Abrams at the NSC, and many
others; outside were a host of think tank and media activists, includ¬
ing Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt of the Project for a New Ameri¬
can Century, William Kristol of the Weekly Standard, Michael Ledeen
of the American Enterprise Institute, Max Singer of the Hudson Insti¬
tute, and The New Republic's Peretz and Lawrence F. Kaplan, and
James Woolsey.

“The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there,” wrote
Kaplan and Kristol in The War Over Iraq. “We stand at the cusp of a
new historical era.... This is a decisive moment.... It is so clearly
about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the
Middle East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the
United States intends to play in the world in the twenty-first cen¬
tury.” 61 At a press conference on the eve of the invasion of Iraq,
Ledeen put the strategy even more bluntly. “I think we are going to be
obliged to fight a regional war, whether we want to or not,” he said,
asserting that the war could not be limited to Iraq. “It may turn out to
be a war to remake the world.” 62

Such grandiose ideas had long marked the neoconservative vision
of the world. In the infamous blueprint for their strategy, drafted in
1996 as a policy memorandum to then-Prime Minister Netanyahu of
Israel, Perle, Feith, Wurmser, and others described a comprehensive
regional policy. The memo, entitled, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy
for Securing the Realm,” called on Israel to work with Turkey and
Jordan to “contain, destabilize, and roll back” various states in the
region, overthrow Saddam Hussein, press Jordan to restore a scion of
its Hashemite dynasty in Baghdad, and launch military action against
Lebanon and Syria as a “prelude to a redrawing of the map of the
Middle East [to] threaten Syria’s territorial integrity.” Nowhere, in
the long memo, did it suggest a policy of countering fundamentalist
Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood, or even A 1 Qaeda. 63

Nor is democracy the real objective of the Bush administration in

Clash of Civilizations? • 337

the Middle East, despite the central place that idea occupies in the
president’s rhetoric. Neoconservatives want to control the Middle
East, not reform it, even if that means tearing countries apart and
replacing them with rump mini-states along ethnic and sectarian lines.
The Islamic right, in this context, is just one more tool for dismantling
existing regimes, if that is what it takes. In “Rethinking the Middle
East” in Foreign Affairs, Bernard Lewis forthrightly described a
process he called “Lebanonization”:

[A] possibility, which could even be precipitated by fundamen¬
talism, is what has of late been fashionable to call “Lebanoniza¬
tion.” Most of the states of the Middle East—Egypt is an obvious
exception—are of recent and artificial construction and are vul¬
nerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weak¬
ened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no
real sense of common identity.... The state then disintegrates—as
happened in Lebanon—into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fight¬
ing sects, tribes, regions and parties. 64

That, of course, is indeed one possible future for Iraq in the wake of
the U.S. invasion, one foreseen by Chas Freeman. “The neoconserva¬
tives’ intention in Iraq was never to truly build democracy there,” he
says. “Their intention was to flatten it, to remove Iraq as a regional
threat to Israel.” 65

Not only Iraq is vulnerable to disintegration, but the neoconserva¬
tives have made explicit their intention to collapse Saudi Arabia, too.
In their book, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror,
Richard Perle and David Frum, both fellows at the American Enter¬
prise Institute, suggest mobilizing Shiite fundamentalists against the
Saudi state. Because the Shiites are a powerful force along the shore of
the Persian Gulf, where Saudi oil fields are, Perle and Frum note that
the Saudis have long feared “that the Shiites might someday seek
independence for the Eastern Province—and its oil.” They add:

Independence for the Eastern Province would obviously be a cata¬
strophic outcome for the Saudi state. But it might be a very good
outcome for the United States. Certainly it’s an outcome to ponder.

338 • Devil’s Game

Even more certainly, we would want the Saudis to know we are
pondering it. 66

Max Singer, the co-founder of the Hudson Institute, has repeatedly
suggested that the United States seek to dismantle the Saudi kingdom
by encouraging breakaway states in both the Eastern Province and the
western Hijaz. “After [Saddam] is removed, there will be an earth¬
quake in the region,” says Singer. “If this means the fall of the [Saudi]
regime, so be it.” 67 Ledeen wrote that the fall of the House of Saud
could lead to the takeover of the country by pro-Al Qaeda radicals.
“In that event,” he says, “we would have to extend the war to the
Arabian Peninsula, at the very least to the oil-producing regions.” 68
James Akins, the former U.S. ambassador in Riyadh, says: “I’ve
stopped saying that Saudi Arabia will be taken over by Osama bin
Laden or a bin Laden clone if we go into Iraq. I’m now convinced that
that’s exactly what [the neoconservatives] want to happen. And then
we take it over.” 69

During the first four years of Bush’s war on terror, many critics
argued that by invading Afghanistan and Iraq and by raising Amer¬
ica’s profile in the Middle East so high, the Bush administration was
creating a new generation of radical Islamists who would blame the
United States for all the ills in the Middle East. Despite its rhetoric
about combating Islamist-inspired terrorism, in neither Afghanistan
nor Iraq did the Bush administration demonstrate a successful strat¬
egy for reversing the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. Michael
Scheuer, writing as “Anonymous” in Imperial Hubris, stated the case
most forcefully:

U.S., British, and other coalition forces are trying to govern appar¬
ently ungovernable postwar states in Afghanistan and Iraq while
simultaneously fighting growing Islamist insurgencies in each—a
state of affairs our leaders call victory. In conducting these activi¬
ties, and the conventional military campaigns preceding them,

U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the
Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do
with but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I

Clash of Civilizations? • 339

think it is fair to conclude that the United States of America
remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally. 70

Whether or not Afghanistan can defeat the remnants of the Tal¬
iban, reverse decades of Islamization, dismantle the underground
forces of the Islamic right, and create a stable, secular state remains to
be seen. Whether Iraq can produce a secular government, crush the
forces associated with A1 Qaeda that have collected there, suppress
Shiite fundamentalist parties such as SCIRI and A1 Dawa that have
dominated postwar Iraq, and hold off efforts by Iran’s ayatollahs to
exercise influence inside the territory of their Arab neighbor is also
an open question. Chances are at least fifty-fifty that in the not-too-
distant future Afghanistan will fall back under the sway of hard-core
Islamists and that Iraq will end up with a theocracy only slightly less
militant that Iran’s. By the same token, the clerical leadership in
Teheran appears to have consolidated its iron grip over power in the
Islamic Republic of Iran. In Pakistan, President Musharraf—who
already tolerates the muscular influence of Islamists in Karachi—could
at any moment fall to an Islamist coup d’etat from the army and the
ISI, in alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood or other militant parties
and groups on the Islamic right. Indonesia and Bangladesh are facing
Islamist insurgencies, Turkey has been drifting into the Islamist camp
for more than a decade, and Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine are
all facing severe pressure from the Muslim Brotherhood. The heart of
the Arab world, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are both facing pressure to
open up their political systems, which many observers believe could
lead to the establishment of Islamic republics in both countries.

The case of Iraq is most startling. President Bush went to war in
Iraq after accusing Saddam Hussein of forging an alliance with A1
Qaeda. He warned that Saddam might be inclined to give weapons of
mass destruction to bin Laden’s cells. But, as became evident in 2003 ,
Saddam’s regime had no ties to A1 Qaeda and no weapons of mass
destruction to distribute. The regime in Baghdad, dictatorial though it
was, was a secular one whose Baath Party leadership was a confirmed
enemy of the Islamists—both the Shiite variety and the Sunni Muslim

34° • Devil’s Game

Brotherhood. But Bush, consciously and with deliberation, encour¬
aged Iraq’s Islamists to reach for power. American forces and the CIA
brought an ayatollah from London to Najaf, Iraq, and forged a prag¬
matic alliance with another ayatollah, Ali al-Sistani, an Iranian cleric
who became the kingmaker in Iraq after the war. The United States
worked with a radical Iraqi cleric, Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, who com¬
manded the 20,000-strong paramilitary Badr Brigade, a force that
was armed and trained by Iran. And it promoted a terrorist group
called the Islamic Call, or A 1 Dawa, a group that over its forty-year
history had conducted bombings, assassinations, and other violent
attacks, including an attack against the American embassy in Kuwait
in the early 1980s. On the Sunni front, in central Iraq, the chief politi¬
cal party to emerge after the war in 2003 was the Iraqi Islamic Party,
the Muslim Brotherhood’s official branch in Iraq.

The Bush administration has set into motion a chain of events that
could lead to a reprise of the Algeria crisis of 1992 in countless states
in the region. Even tiny states such as Kuwait, where the Brotherhood
is strong, and Bahrain, with its Sunni royal family and its Shiite
majority population, are vulnerable to Islamic revolution or ballot-
box Islamist triumphs—or both.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a former CIA officer with experience in Iraq
and the Middle East, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and
a neoconservative hard-liner who was a leading voice in support of the
U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. For three years after 2002, he
appeared at AEI forums alongside Perle, Ledeen, and other neoconser¬
vatives, while writing for the Weekly Standard and many other right-
wing publications, including the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page.
Early in 2005 Gerecht dropped all pretense of opposing the Islamic
right, issuing a clarion call for the United States to encourage both
Sunni and Shiite fundamentalism throughout the entire Middle East.

In a January 2005 appearance at AEI, Gerecht announced the
release of his new book. The Islamic Paradox: Shiite Clerics, Sunni
Fundamentalists, and the Coming of Arab Democracy. In it, Gerecht
declared that the future of the Middle East lies with the Islamic right,
and that the United States ought to welcome it. Although many Amer-

Clash of Civilizations f • 34

icans hope that moderate, secular Muslims are the silent majority in
the Middle East, Gerecht says, “ ‘Moderate Muslims’ may not be the
key to a new, less threatening Middle East.” 71 He added:

Most American liberals and conservatives will strongly resist the
idea that Islam’s clergymen and lay fundamentalists, who usually
dislike, if not detest, the United States, Israel, and progressive
causes like women’s rights, are the key to liberating the Muslim
Middle East from its age-old reflexive hostility to the West. These
men, not the much-admired liberal Muslim secularists who are
always praised and sometimes defended by the American govern¬
ment and press, are the United States’ most valuable potential
democratic allies. 72

Gerecht compares Khomeini favorably to Mubarak:

Khomeini submitted the idea of an Islamic republic to an up-or-
down popular vote in 1979, and regular elections with some ele¬
ment of competition are morally essential to the regime’s
conception of its own legitimacy, something not at all the case
with President Husni Mubarak’s dictatorship in Egypt. 73 . . . Anti-
Americanism is the common denominator of the Arab states with
“pro-American” dictators. By comparison, Iran is a profoundly
pro-American country. 74

And after acknowledging the direct intellectual connections between
Hassan al-Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood and Osama bin Laden’s Al
Qaeda, he concludes, astonishingly, that a Muslim Brotherhood dic¬
tatorship in Egypt would be better than Mubarak’s regime:

Egypt is probably the Arab country that has the best chance of
quickly marrying fundamentalism and democracy. It is certainly
possible that fundamentalists, if they gained power in Egypt,
would try to end representative government. The democratic
ethic, although much more common in Egypt than many Western¬
ers believe, is not as well anchored as it is among the Shiites of Iran
or in the fatwas of Grand Ayatollah Sistani. But the United States
would still be better off with this alternative than with a secular
dictatorship. 75

342. • Devil’s Game

Sixty years earlier, when the United States began its odyssey in the
Middle East, there were other voices who wanted conservative Islam,
and early fundamentalist groups associated with the nascent Islamic
right, to do battle with the secular left, with Nasser, with Arab com¬
munists and socialists. Now, six decades later, the Bush adminis¬
tration is pursuing a strategy in the Middle East that seems calculated
to boost the fortunes of the Islamic right. The United States is count¬
ing on Shiite fundamentalists in Iraq to save its failed policy in that
country, and a major theoretician of that campaign explicitly calls for
the United States to cast its lot in with ayatollahs and the Muslim
Brotherhood.

The devil’s game continues.

Notes

i: Imperial Pan-Islam

1. The proposal to London from Jamal Eddine al-Afghani was reported by
a British Orientalist and author of the time, W. S. Blunt, a friend of Afghani’s. It
is cited in C. C. Adams, Islam and Modernism in Egypt (New York: Russell and
Russell, 1933), p. 10, n. 1.

2. Elie Kedourie, Afghani and Abduh: An Essay on Religious Unbelief
and Political Activism in Modern Islam (New York: The Humanities Press,
1966), p. 30.

3. Kedourie, p. 6.

4. Ibid., p. 13.

5. Cited in Kedourie, p. 45.

6. Ibid.

7. Afghani’s views on religion are quoted at length in Kedourie, p. 44.

8. Cited in Kedourie, p. 4. Kedourie commented wryly on Gibb’s view, say¬
ing: “Afghani would no doubt have been much gratified to see that half a cen¬
tury after his death, his pretentions to ‘sound Koranic orthodoxy’ were still
being unquestioningly accepted.”

9. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Islam in Modern History (New York: New
American Library, 1957), p. 54.

10. Smith, pp. 56-57.

11. Ibid., p. 55.

12. Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (London:
Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 321.

13. Nikki Keddie, “Afghani in Afghanistan,” Middle Eastern Studies (1)4.

14. Kedourie, pp. 20—21.

344 * Notes

15. Ibid., p. 8.

16. Adams, p. 54.

17. Ibid., pp. 30-31.

18. Adams, p. 18.

19. Ibid., p. 39. Wrote Kedourie: “It is, at any rate, reasonable to presume
that having offered his services to the British, Afghani would offer them again to
the French.” In any case, France tolerated The Indissoluble Bond, while Great
Britain, Egypt, and India banned it.

20. Adams, p. 9, n. 5.

21. Kedourie, p. 54.

22. Ibid., p. 58.

23. Quoted in Adams, pp.59-60.

24. Kedourie, p. 14.

25. Adams, p. 83.

26. Ibid., p. 79.

27. Kedourie, p. 56.

28. Cited in Kedourie, p. 57.

29. E. G. Browne, A Year amongst the Persians (London: Adam and Charles
Black, 1950), pp. 13-14.

30. For an account of the relationship between Khan and Afghani, see
Kedourie, pp. 22-23.

31. Adams, p. 11.

32. Kedourie, p. 4.

33. Ibid., p. 5.

34. David Long, The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (Gainesville: University Press
of Florida, 1997), p. 22.

35. In Arabic, muwahhidin. See Long, p. 23.

36. Hamid Algar, Wahhabism: A Critical Essay (Oneonta, N.Y.: Islamic
Publications International, 2002), p. 5.

37. Algar, pp. 14-16.

38. William Gifford Palgrave, Personal Narrative of a Year’s Journey
through Central and Eastern Arabia (1862-1863) (London: Macmillan and
Co., 1993), p. 184.

39. Algar, pp. 20-22.

40. Ibid., pp. 23-25.

41. Ibid.

42. John Esposito, Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 108.

43. Algar, p. 38.

44. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 284.

45. Ibid., p. 285.

46. The word ikhwan is the plural of akh (brother) and can be translated as
brothers or brotherhood.

Notes • 345

47. David Holden and Richard Johns, The House ofSaud (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1981), pp. 50-51.

48. Ibid., pp. 11-26.

49. Elizabeth Monroe, Philby of Arabia (New York: Pitman Publishing Cor¬
poration, 1973), p. 24.

50. Ibid., p. 70.

51. Cited in Monroe, p. 104.

52. Cited in Monroe, p. 127.

53. Philby’s critics disparaged his supposed pro-republican stance. Says
Monroe: “They were quick to point out, too, that his republican nostrum for
the Arab world did not tally with his unstinted praise for the absolute rule of his
hero, Ibn Saud.” Ibid., p. 139.

54. Ibid., p. 139.

55. Algar, p. 42.

56. Cited in John S. Habib, Ibn Saud’s Warriors of Islam (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1978), p. 14.

57. Ibid., p. 20.

58. Ibid., pp. 26-27.

59. Percy Cox, cited in Dore Gold, Hatred’s Kingdom (Washington: Regnery
Publishing, 2003), pp. 44-45.

60. The term hijra means “immigration,” but in this case it refers to the
notion that a Muslim must “immigrate” to Islam, by abandoning his nomadic
ties and tribal connections.

61. Habib, p. 32.

62. Ibid., p. 76.

63. Monroe, p. 135.

64. Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam (New York: The Modern Library,
2003), pp. 125-26.

65. Habib, p. 119.

1: England’s Brothers

1. In Arabic, Al Manar.

2. A detailed account of Rashid Rida’s work is found in C. C. Adams, Islam
and Modernism in Egypt (New York: Russell and Russell, 1933), pp. 177-204.

3. Cited in Adams, p. 185.

4. Ibid., p. 186.

5. Ibid., p. 222.

6. Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (London:
Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 9. The source Mitchell uses is al-Banna’s
autobiography.

7. Ibid., p. 5.

8. Ibid., p. 322.

9. Ibid., p. 321.

346 • Notes

to. Ibid., p. 186.

n.Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap Press, 2002), p. 27.

12. Mitchell, p. 246.

13. Ibid., p. T4.

14. In Arabic, kataib. Interestingly, the same word was used by the fascist
Christian Lebanese Phalangists led by the Gemayel family of warlords, them¬
selves, like many Islamists, admirers of Hitler.

15. Mitchell, pp. T3-16.

16. Joel Gordon, interview with author, June 2004.

17. Mitchell, pp. 40-42.

t 8. Ibid., p. 27.

19. Zvi Kaplinsky, “The Muslim Brotherhood,” Middle Eastern Affairs,
December T954, p. 378.

20. Mitchell, p. 32.

2r. Kaplinsky, p. 378.

22. Stephen Dorril, MI6 (New York: The Free Press, 2000), p. 538.

23. Mitchell, p. 39.

24. Ibid., p. 40.

25. Said K. Aburish, Nasser: The Last Arab (New York: Thomas Dunne
Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2.004), P- 18*

26. Anwar Sadat, In Search of Identity (New York: Harper Sc Row, 1977).
Sadat’s version must be taken with a grain of salt, however. Written in the mid-
1970s, at a time when Sadat was engaged in a delicate effort to forge a political
alliance with the revived Muslim Brotherhood, the book undoubtedly leaves out
some important details.

27. Sadat, p. 22.

28. Ibid.

29. Miles Copeland, The Game of Nations (New York: Simon 8c Schuster,
1969), p. 184.

30. Ibid.

31. Mitchell, p. 47 and passim.

32. Mitchell, p. 55.

33. Joseph B. Schechtman, The Mufti and the Fuehrer (New York: Thomas
Yoseloff, 1965), p. 287.

34. Ibid., p. 21.

35. Political Dictionary of the Middle East in the 2 oth Century (Jerusalem:
The Jerusalem Publishing House Ltd., 1972), p. 260.

36. Schechtman, pp. 23-24.

37. Ibid., p. 45.

38. Ibid., p. 106.

39. Ibid., p. 172.

40. Clifton Daniel, “A New Chapter for the Mysterious Mufti,” New York
Times Magazine, August 25,1946.

Notes • 347

41. Joseph Alsop, “Crafty Fanatic Organizes Trouble in Palestine,” Boston
Evening Globe, December 17,1947.

42. Dorril, p. 537.

43. Ibid., p. 540.

44. Andrew Roth, “The Mufti’s New Army,” The Nation, November 1 6,
1946.

45. Schechtman, p. 223.

46. Ibid., p. 234.

47. No one was ever arrested in the assassination of Banna. According to
most historians, his death was ordered by the Egyptian government and carried
out by government security officers.

3: Islam Meets the Cold War

1. This account is taken from an April 2004 interview with Hermann Eilts,
one of America’s leading Arabists and the former U.S. ambassador to Egypt, who
served in several posts in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula early in his career.

2. Said K. Aburish, Nasser: The Last Arab (New York: Thomas Dunne
Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2004), p. 30. Other estimates put the number of
Brotherhood members at several hundred thousand.

3. Miles Copeland, The Game of Nations (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1969), p. 48.

4. Elizabeth Monroe, Philby of Arabia (New York: Pitman Publishing Cor¬
poration, 1973), p. 162.

5. Ibid., p. r64.

6 . Ibid., p. 168.

7. Ibid., p. 211.

8. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power
(New York: Simon &C Schuster, 1991), p. 291.

9. Standard Oil of California, or Socal, was originally part of the Rocke¬
feller Standard Oil monopoly. The Texas Oil Company, or Texaco, would even¬
tually merge with Socal (renamed Chevron) to become today’s ChevronTexaco.
Two other Rockefeller entities, Standard Oil of New Jersey (Esso, later Exxon)
and Standard Oil of New York (Socony, later Mobil) would also merge to form
ExxonMobil.

10. Executive Order 8926, February 18,1943. Quoted in David Holden and
Richard Johns, The House of Saud (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,

1981), p- 12.3-

11. Yergin, p. 394.

12. Ibid., p. 397.

13. Ibid., p. 401.

14. Ibid.

15. Elliott Roosevelt, As He Saw It (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce,
1946), p. 244.

348 ■ Notes

16. Cited in Yergin, pp. 404-5.

17. David Long, The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (Gainesville: University Press
of Florida, 1997), p. 116.

18. The single best account of how the United States saw national security-
issues in the Middle East from 1945 to 1958 is John C. Campbell’s The Defense
of the Middle East (New York: Frederick C. Praeger, i960).

19. The photograph is found in the September 1953 proceedings of the Collo¬
quium on Islamic Culture, held at Princeton University and in Washington, D.C.

2.0. The Jamaat-e Islami. Throughout, I try to use English translations of
organizational names that are usually left untranslated from the original Arabic,
Farsi, Urdu, Turkish, or other Middle Eastern languages.

21. This and other details of Ramadan’s life and career can be found in Dr.
Said Ramadan, 1926-1995, a useful biographical sketch published on the Inter¬
net by the Islamic Center of Geneva, which was founded by Ramadan in 1961.
See www.cige.org/historique.htm.

22. Ziad Abu Amr, Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 1-5.

23. Alain Gresh and Dominique Vidal, The New A-Z of the Middle East
(London: I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2004), p. 107.

24. Ibid.

25. Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of Muslim Brothers (London: Oxford
University Press, 1969), p. 270.

26. Ibid.

27. Islami Jamaat-i Tulabah, the student wing of the Jamaat-e Islami
(Islamic Group). For a detailed discussion of the IJT, see Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr,
The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994), p. 64ff.

28. Ibid., p. 65.

29. Also known by its Arabic name, the Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami.

30. Marion Boulby, The Muslim Brotherhood and the Kings of Jordan
(Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1999), pp. 37-43.

31. Conference on Islamic Civilization, U.S. Department of State, Interna¬
tional Information Administration. This is a memo intended for Secretary of
State John Foster Dulles. Washington, D.C.: National Security Archive, April
30 , 1953 -

32. Jefferson Caffery, U.S. Department of State, Colloquium on Islamic Cul¬
ture and Saeed Ramadhan. Foreign Service Dispatch. Washington, D.C.:
National Security Archive, July 27,1953.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

35. Sylvain Besson, “When the Swiss Protected Radical Islam in the Name of
Reasons of State,” Le Temps, October 26, 2004.

36. Bernard Lewis, “Communism and Islam,” in The Middle East in Transi¬
tion, ed. Walter Laqueur (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1958), pp. 311-24.

37. Colloquium on Islamic Culture, pp. 86-89.

Notes • 349

38. Kenneth Cragg, “The Intellectual Impact of Communism upon Contem¬
porary Islam,” Middle East Journal 8 (2.) (Spring 1954), pp. 127-38.

39. Campbell, p. 299. A quarter century later, however, Campbell would
modify his view somewhat. Writing in the spring 1984 issue of American-Arab
Affairs (No. 8, p. 80), Campbell would say: “Khomeini seems to enjoy humiliat¬
ing the ‘atheistic’ Soviet Union regardless of the actuality of the threat. The Sovi¬
ets have been whipsawed by the emergence of Islam as a growing and powerful
political force in the Middle East.. .. The regime in Iran [has] supported
counter-revolutionary Islamic reactionaries in Afghanistan. The swirling cur¬
rents of Islamic reassertion are not without impact on the Muslims of Soviet
central Asia.” A lot would change in the twenty-five years between Campbell’s
CFR task force and the revolution in Iran.

40. S. A. Morrison, “Arab Nationalism and Islam,” Middle East Journal
(April 1948), pp. 147-59.

41. “Anti-Communist Poster Material Prepared by USIS Baghdad,” March
10, 1951. National Security Archive.

42. Copeland, p. 58.

43. Ibid., p. 184.

44. Ibid., pp. 185-86.

45. William A. Eddy, letter to Dorothy Thompson, June 7, 1951. National
Security Archive.

46. Patrick O’Donnell, Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs (New York: The
Free Press, 2004), pp. 31-32.

47. “Conversation with Prince Saud,” March 10, 1952. National Security
Archive.

48. David Long, interview with author, April 2004.

49. The Middle East Institute, “Islam in the Modern World,” March 9-10,
1951, p. 72.

50. Ibid., pp. 15-18.

51. Ibid., pp. 13-14.

4: The War against Nasser and Mossadegh

1. Quoted in Said K. Aburish, Nasser: The Last Arab (New York: Thomas
Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2004), p. 314.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., p. 315.

4. Ed Kane, interview with author. May 2004.

5. Ibid.

6. Miles Copeland, The Game of Nations (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1969), p. 62.

7. Ibid., p. 63.

8. Ibid., p. 65.

9. Joel Gordon, Nasser’s Blessed Movement (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992), p. 158.

3 5° • Notes

10. Copeland, p. 74.

11. The most detailed account of this period is in Gordon’s Nasser’s Blessed
Movement, pp. 98-106 and 175-90.

12. Gordon, p. 103.

13. Stephen Dorril, MI6 (New York: The Free Press, zooo), p. 610.

14. Ibid., p. 613.

15. Gordon, p. 105.

16. Ibid., p. 106.

17. Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil (New York: Crown Publishers,
2.003), P- 99-

18. Bernard Lewis, The Middle East and the West (New York: Harper &
Row, 1964), pp. 112-13.

19. Richard Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (London: Oxford
University Press, 1969), pp. 141-42.

20. Dorril, pp. 633-34.

21. Cited in Gordon, p. 186. From The New York Times, November 17,1954.

22. Copeland, p. 183.

23. Dorril, p. 629.

24. Copeland, p. 282.

25. Ibid., p. 184.

26. John Voll, interview with author, March 2004.

27. Interviews with former Iranian officials.

28. Ashraf Pahlavi, Faces in a Mirror: Memoirs from Exile (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980), pp. 8-9.

29. For an account of the secularizing measures undertaken by Shah Reza
Pahlavi, see Dilip Hiro, Eloly Wars (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 153.

30. Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Answer to History (New York: Stein and
Day, 1980), p. 84.

31. Fereydoun Hoveyda, interview with author, May 2004.

32. Ashraf Pahlavi, p. 6.

33. Ibid., p. 47.

34. Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, p. 59.

35. Mark J. Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah: Building a
Client State in Iran (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 68.

36. Central Intelligence Agency, “Prospects for Survival of Mossadeq
Regime in Iran,” October 14,1952, p. 2.

37. U.S. State Department, “C. C. Finch conversation with Dr. Sepahbodi,”
December 10,1952..

38. Dorril, p. 566.

39. Ibid., p. 565. Dorril’s book provides extensive detail of the Anglo-
American action in 1953, including support for the Islamists. More detail is pro¬
vided in Gasiorowski’s U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah, especially pp. 67-79.
See also Gasiorowski, “The 1953 Coup d’etat in Iran,” International Journal of
Middle East Studies 19 (1987).

40. John Waller, interview with the author, February 2004.

Notes • 35

41. Dorril, p. 585.

4Z. Waller, interview.

43. Dorril, p. 592.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid., pp. 59 z— 93 -

46. Hoveyda, interview.

47. The information about the early years of Khomeini’s political life is
taken largely from the brilliant biography of the ayatollah by Baqer Moin,
Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s
Press, 1999).

48. Moin, p. 60.

49. Ibid., pp. 63-64.

j: The King of All Islam

The epigraph is from Miles Copeland, The Game of Nations (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1969), p. 216.

1. Cited in Fred Halliday, Arabia without Sultans (New York: Vintage
Books, 1975), p. 66.

2. David Holden and Richard Johns, The House ofSaud (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1981), p. 193.

3. Dwight Eisenhower, The White House Years, Vol. II: Waging Peace
(London: Heinemann, 1965), pp. 115-16.

4. Malcolm H. Kerr, The Arab Cold War, Gamal Abd al-Nasir and His
Rivals, 1958-1970 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971). More recently, see
Adeed Dawisha, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to
Despair (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).

5. James E. Akins, interview with author, June 2004.

6. Holden and Johns, p. 177.

7. Nathan J. Citino, From Arab Nationalism to OPEC: Eisenhower, King
Saud, and the Making of U.S.-Saudi Relations (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2002), p. 95.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., p. 126.

10. John Waller, interview with author, February 2004.

11. Donald N. Wilber, Adventures in the Middle East: Excursions and
Incursions (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin, 1986), p. 195.

12. Ibid.

13. Citino, p. 96.

14. Holden and Johns, p. 194.

15. The late-i95os CIA action against Syria has been widely reported. Its
existence was confirmed to me in interviews by several former CIA officials who
were involved, among them Ray Close.

16. Retired CIA operations officer, interview with author, July 2004.

17. David Long, interview with the author, April 2004.

3 5 2. ■ Notes

18. John Voll, interview with the author, March 2.004.

19. Ray Close, interview with the author, April 2004.

20. Hermann Eilts, interview with the author, April 2004.

21. Reinhard Schulze, A Modern History of the Islamic World, trans. Azizeh
Azodi (New York: New York University Press, 2000), p. 127.

22. Dore Gold, Hatred’s Kingdom (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing,
2003), p. 91.

23. Holden and Johns, p. 262.

24. Gold, p. 110.

25. Gilles Kepel , Jihad (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002), p. 51.

26. Ibid., p. 78.

27. Eilts, interview.

28. Martha Kessler, interview with author, April 2004.

29. Charles Freeman, interview with the author, April 2004.

30. For a complete list of the founding members of the Muslim World
League, see Schulze, p. 172.

31. Schulze, p. 173.

32. John Esposito, Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 106-8.

33. Kepel, p. 52.

34. Retired CIA official, interview with the author, June 2004.

35. Charles Waterman, interview with the author, July 2004.

36. Gold, pp. 76-79.

37. Quoted in “Secrets of the Financial Holy War,” Le Nouvel Observateur,
January 31,2004.

38. Hani Ramadan, interview with Valentina Marano, September 2004.

39. The Call (Al Dawa) was founded in 1957, expanded in the 1960s, car¬
ried out terrorist sabotage in the 1980s and 1990s—including an attack on
the U.S. embassy in Kuwait—and, in 2003, emerged as an overt force in post-
Saddam Hussein Iraq.

40. Gilles Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt (Berkeley: University of Cali¬
fornia Press, 1993), pp. 33-34.

41. Sylvain Besson, Le Temps, October 26, 2004.

42. Esposito, p. 106.

43. Eilts, interview.

44. Talcott Seelye, interview with the author, June 2004.

45. Cited in Warren Bass, Support Any Friend (New York: Oxford Univer¬
sity Press, 2003), p. 77, from Foreign Relations of the United States 1961-1963,
Vol. 17, pp. 164-66.

46. Bass, p. 79.

47. Ibid., p. 53.

48. Ibid., p. 99.

49. Ibid., p. 102.

50. Seelye, interview.

Notes • 353

51. Cited in Bass, pp. 103-4.

52. Ibid., p. 43.

53. Stephen Dorril, MI6 (New York: The Free Press), 2000, p. 680.

54. Ibid., pp. 680-85.

5 5. Howard Teicher and Gayle Radley Teicher, Twin Pillars to Desert Storm
(New York: William Morrow, 1993), p. 94.

56. Bass, p. 114.

57. Charles Freeman, interview with the author, April 2004.

58. Shireen Hunter, The Future of Islam and the West (Westport, Conn.:
Praeger, 1988), pp. 156-57.

59. Bass, p. 141.

60. Holden and Johns, p. 271.

61. Saudi Ministry of Information, Faisal Speaks (undated collection of King
Faisal’s speeches).

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid.

64. Hunter, p. 159.

65. Gold, p. 93.

66. Long, interview.

67. Holden and Johns, p. 290.

68. Abdullah M. Sindi, “King Faisal and Pan-Islamism,” in Willard A. Bel-
ing, King Faisal and the Modernisation of Saudi Arabia (London: Croom Helm,
1980), p. 190.

69. Long, interview.

6: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

1. David Long, interview with the author, April 2004.

2. Anwar Sadat, In Search of Identity (New York: Harper & Row, 1977),
p. 215.

3. Michael Dunn, interview with the author, February 2004.

4. Reinhard Schulze, A Modern History of the Islamic World (New York:
New York University Press, 2000), p. 189.

5. David Holden and Richard Johns, The House ofSaud (New York: Holt,
Rinehart & Winston, 1981), p. 289.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., p. 292.

8. Mohammed Heikal, The Sphinx and the Commissar (New York: Harper
8c Row, 1978), p. 219.

9. Holden and Johns, p. 293.

10. Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1979), p. 1293.

11. Sadat, p. 224.

12. Raymond Close, interview with the author, April 2004.

3 54 ’ Notes

13. Gilles Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt (Berkeley: University of Cali¬
fornia Press, T993), p. 105.

14. In Arabic, jama’at islamiyya.

15. John Esposito, Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2.002), p. 86.

16. Kepel, p. 133.

17. Ibid., p. 129.

18. Much of the information and quotes in this paragraph are taken from
Kepel, pp. 133-40, whose work on Islamism in Egypt during this period is
definitive.

19. Schulze, p. 201.

20. Daniel Pipes, In the Path of God (New York: Basic Books, 1983),
p. 209.

21. Abdel Moneim Said, interview with the author, July 2004.

22. Hermann Eilts, interview with the author, April 2004.

23. Close, interview.

24. Martha Kessler, interview with the author, April 2004.

25. The Liberation Party is known in Arabic as Hizb ut-Tahrir. It still exists.
The party fled the Middle East, relocated to Germany, and then built a power
base in Soviet Central Asia.

26. Kepel, pp. 92-94.

27. Said, interview.

28. Eilts, interview.

29. Said, interview.

30. Eilts, interview.

31. Ibid.

32. Former CIA officer, interview with the author, June 2004.

33. Kathy Christison, interview with the author, March 2004.

34. Eilts, interview.

35. Retired CIA officer, interview with the author, June 2004.

36. Kepel, p. 108.

37. Ibid., pp. 108-9.

38. Samer Soliman, “The Rise and Decline of the Islamic Banking Model
in Egypt,” in The Politics of Islamic Finance, ed. Clement M. Henry and
Rodney Wilson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), p. 266.

39. Said, interview.

40. Monzer Kahf, “The Rise of a New Power Alliance,” in Henry and Wilson,
p. 22.

41. Ibrahim Warde, Islamic Finance in the Global Economy (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 211.

42. Soliman, in Henry and Wilson, p. 273.

43. Ibid., p. 270.

44. Ibid., pp. 270-71. Egypt’s tolerance of Islamic banking was scaled back
in the 1980s, after the assassination of Sadat made it clear how dangerous the
Islamist movement could be.

Notes • 355

45. Kahf, in Henry and Wilson, p. in.

46. Soliman, in Henry and Wilson, p. 276.

47. Cited in Richard Labeviere, Dollars for Terror: The United States and
Islam (New York: Algora Publishing, 2000), p. 138. Labeviere presents a
detailed picture of A1 Taqwa’s involvement in Egypt, Turkey, and elsewhere.

48. Ibid., p. 139.

49. Douglas Farah, Blood from Stones : The Secret Financial Network of
Terror (New York: Broadway Books, 2004), p. 148.

50. Warde, p. 84.

51. Soliman, in Henry and Wilson, p. 273.

7: The Rise of Economic Islam

1. For details on the mechanisms of Islamic finance sans interest (in Arabic,
riba), see Clement M. Henry and Rodney Wilson, eds., The Politics of Islamic
Finance (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004); and Rodney Wilson,
Islamic Financial Markets (London: Routledge, 1990). Another well-written
book is Timur Kuran’s Islam and Mammon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer¬
sity Press, 2004). Finally, a wonderfully complete book is Ibrahim Warde’s
Islamic Finance in the Global Economy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2000).

2. Warde, p. 108.

3. See “Hopes for the Future of Islamic Finance,” by Abbas Mirakhor, an
executive director of the International Monetary Fund and an Islamic scholar
from the Islamic Republic of Iran.

4. Ibrahim Warde, interview with Barbara Dreyfuss, August 2004.

5. Clement Henry, “Islamic Financial Movements: Midwives of Political
Change in the Middle East?” (paper presented to the 2001 Annual Meeting of
the American Political Science Association, University of Texas at Austin), p. 6.

6 . Warde, p. 107.

7. Warde, p. 99.

8. Clement Henry, “Islamic Financial Movements: Midwives of Political
Change in the Middle East?”

9. Warde, interview.

10. Nizam Ali, interview with Barbara Dreyfuss, August 2004.

11. Peter Ferrara and Khaled Saffuri, “Islam and the Free Market,” Islamic
Free Market Institute Foundation, at http:www.islamicinstitute.org/freemrkt
.htm. Accessed September 2004.

12. Graham Fuller, The Future of Political Islam (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003), p. 26.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., p. 35.

15. Ibid., p. 141.

16. Agence France Presse, “Islamic Banks, Institutions Boast Assets of 260
Billion Dollars,” April 25, 2004.

356 • Notes

17. Hanna Batatu, “Iraq’s Underground Shi’a Movements,” Middle East
Journal 35 (Autumn 1981), 4, p. 578.

18. Graham Fuller and Rend Rahim Francke, The Arab Shi’a: The Forgotten
Muslims (New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press, 1999), p. 47. Fuller, a former
CIA official, is a vocal apologist for fundamentalist Islam. Francke, former head
of the Iraq Foundation, would be named the first post-Saddam Hussein ambas¬
sador to the United States from Iraq under the interim government of Prime
Minister Iyad Allawi in Z003.

19. Ibid., p. 48.

zo. For a complete account of the Oudh Bequest, see Yitzhak Nakash, The
Shi'is of Iraq (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), PP- 2.11-29.

21. Fuller and Francke, p. 48.

22. Nakash, p. 135.

23. Samer Soliman, “The Islamic Banking Model in Egypt,” in Henry and
Wilson, p. 267.

24. Soliman, in Henry and Wilson, p. 267.

25. Jamal al-Banna, foreword, in unpublished book manuscript by Ahmed
al-Najjar, translated by Rubah Elfattouh and Abdel Kader Thomas.

26. Najjar, unpublished manuscript, chapter 3.

27. Mohammed Malley, “The Political Implications of Islamic Finance in
Jordan” (paper prepared for the 2001 annual meeting of the Middle East Stud¬
ies Association, University of Texas at Austin).

28. Monzer Kahf, “The Rise of a New Power Alliance,” in Henry and Wilson,
p. 19.

29. Najjar, unpublished manuscript, chapter 4.

30. Interview with Barbara Dreyfuss, August 2004.

31. Najjar, unpublished manuscript, chapter 9.

32. Richard Labeviere, Dollars for Terror: The United States and Islam
(New York: Algora Publishing, 2000), p. 240.

33. Kahf, in Henry and Wilson, p. 24.

34. Andre Stiansen, “Interest Politics: Islamic Finance in the Sudan, 1977-
2001,” in Clement and Henry, p. 157.

35. New York Times, August 12, 2004.

36. Monzer Kahf, “Strategic Trends in the Islamic Banking and Finance
Movement” (paper presented at the Harvard Forum on Islamic Finance and
Banking, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., April 6-7, 2002).

37. Ibid.

38. Talcott Seelye, interview with the author, June 2004.

39. Former CIA official, interview with the author, June 2004.

40. Ibid.

41. Kristin Smith, “The Kuwait Finance House and the Islamization of Pub¬
lic Life in Kuwait,” in Henry and Wilson, pp. 168-90.

42. Ibid., p. 172.

43. Ibid., p. 169.

44. Shafeeq N. Ghabra, “Balancing State and Society: The Islamic Move¬
ment in Kuwait,” Middle East Policy (May 1977), pp. 61-62.

Notes • 357

45. Ibid., p. 60.

46. Smith, in Henry and Wilson, p. 178.

47. Ibid. One of Kuwait’s charities was placed on the U.S. government’s list
of organizations suspected of ties to Osama bin Laden, according to an Associ¬
ated Press story, “Kuwait Questions Islamic Charity on Allegation of Funding
Terrorists,” December 29, 2001.

48. Smith, in Henry and Wilson, p. 181.

49. Ghabra, p. 61.

8: Israel’s Islamists

1. Charles Freeman, interview with the author, July 2004.

2. Khaled Hroub, Hamas: Political Thought and Practice (Washington,
D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2000), p. 15 .

3. Ziad Abu-Amr, Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 3.

4. Hroub, p. 16.

5. Ibid., p. 20.

6. Marion Boulby, The Muslim Brotherhood and the Kings of Jordan
(Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1999), pp. 37-43.

7. Ibid., p. 43.

8. Ibid., p. 61.

9. Cited in Abu-Amr, p. 5.

10. Hroub, pp. 21-23.

11. Former CIA official who served in Kuwait in the 1950s and who knew
many of the PLO leaders, interview with the author, 2004.

12. Hroub, pp. 25-27.

i3.Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 17.

14. Ibid., p. 18.

15. Abu-Amr, p. 17.

1 6. Ray Hanania, “Sharon’s Terror Child,” Counterpunch , January 18-19,
2003.

17. David Shipler, Arabs and Jews: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land
(New York: Penguin, 1987), p. 177.

18. Mishal and Sela, p. 21.

19. Abu-Amr, pp. 29, 31.

20. Martha Kessler, interview with the author, April 2004.

21. Ibid.

22. David Long, interview with the author, April 2004.

23. Philip Wilcox, inter.view with the author, March 2004.

24. Dilip Hiro, Holy Wars (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 87.

25. Hiro, in chapter 4, presents a detailed account of the Muslim Brother¬
hood’s growth in Syria from the 1930 s through the 1976-82 civil war in
Syria.

26. Hiro, chapter 4.

358 • Notes

27. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, September 29, 1981, quoting Marj
Uyun, “Voice of Hope,” in Arabic.

28. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, February 28, 1981, citing Damas¬
cus radio.

29. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, March ri, 1981, citing Damascus
radio.

30. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, April 10, 1981, citing Damascus
radio.

31. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, December 4, 1981, citing Damas¬
cus radio.

32. Steven Strasser, “A Brotherly Bomb in Damascus,” Newsweek, Decem¬
ber 14,1981.

3 3. Long, interview.

34. Kessler, interview.

35. Talcott Seelye, interview with the author, June 2004.

36. “Jordan Ends Shelter for Assad’s Enemies,” London Times, November
12, 1985.

37. Charles P. Wallace, “Visit to Damascus Moves Jordan, Syria Closer,”
Los Angeles Times, November 13,1985.

38. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, November 18,1985.

39. Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil (New York: Crown Publishers,
2003), pp. 95-97.

40. Robert Baer, interview with the author, March 2004.

41. Seelye, interview.

42. Judith Miller, God Has Ninety-nine Names (New York: Simon & Schus¬
ter, 1996), p. 295.

43. “Bloody Challenge to Assad,” Time, March 8, 1982.

44. Seelye, interview.

45. Patrick Lang, interview with the author, March 2004.

46. See Victor Ostrovsky and Claire Hoy, By Way of Deception (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1990), and Victor Ostrovsky, The Other Side of Deception
(New York: HarperCollins, 1994). Ostrovsky is a highly controversial, polariz¬
ing figure, and some of his assertions seem far-fetched. He refused to talk to me
when I called him for elaboration. His charges about Islamism, however, are
coherent with other sources.

47. Ostrovsky, The Other Side of Deception, pp. 196-97.

48. Ibid., p. 197.

49. Abu-Amr, pp. 43-44.

50. Ibid., p. 49.

51. Mishal and Sela, p. 34.

52. Wilcox, interview.

53. Freeman, interview.

54. Patrick Lang, interview with the author, March 2004.

5 5. Corriere della Sera, December 11, 2001.

56. Hanania, pp. 9,14.

Notes • 359

57. Ibid., p. 9.

58. Sara Roy, “Hamas and the Transformation of Political Islam in Pales¬
tine,” Current History, January 2003, p. 14.

59. Ibid., pp. 18-19.

60. Ibid., p. 20.

9: Hell’s Ayatollah

1. George Lambrakis, “Understanding the Shiite Islamic Movement,”
“confidential” dispatch, February 2,1978.

2. James Bill, “Iran and the Crisis of 1978,” Foreign Affairs, Winter 1978-
79 , P- 34 °-

3. Henry Precht, interview with the author, April 2004.

4. Thomas Ahern, interview with the author, June 2004.

5. Cited in James Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-
Iranian Relations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 133.

6. Retired CIA official, interview with the author, May 2004.

7. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion, p. 137.

8. Baqer Moin, Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah (New York: Thomas
Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, 1999), p. 80. Moin’s biography of Khomeini is
an amazingly detailed and well-written portrait of the man, far and away the
best book in English about Khomeini.

9. Moin, p. 88.

10. Cited in Gary Sick, All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter with
Iran (New York: Random House, 1985), p. 22.

11. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion, p. 228.

12. Interview with Charles Cogan, Episode 20, Soldiers of God, at: www
.gwu.edu/-nsarchiv/coldwaar/interviews/episode-20/cogan2.html. Accessed May
2004.

13. Juan Cole, interview with the author, July 2004.

14. Charles Naas, interview with the author, June 2004.

15. Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Answer to History (New York: Stein and
Day, 1980), p. 165.

1 6. Former CIA operations officer, interview with the author, June 2004.

17. Former State Department official, interview with the author, July 2004.

18. Anonymous U.S. State Department report, “Religious Circles,” May
1972. Included in documents released by Iran from those captured in the
takeover of the U.S. embassy in 1979.

19. The CIA reports were declassified and made the subject of a congressional
investigation that released a public report in January 1979. The citations I used
are taken from Sick.

20. Sick, p. 90.

21. Stansfield Turner, e-mail to the author, April 2004.

22. Walter Cutler, interview with the author, May 2004.

23. Retired CIA officer, interview. May 2004.

360 • Notes

24. Precht, interview. May 2004.

25. Ibid.

26. Fereydoun Hoveyda, interview with the author. May 2004.

27. Interview with Charles Cogan, Episode 20, Soldiers of God, at: www.gwu
,edu/~nsarchiv/coldwaar/interviews/episode-2o/cogani.html. Accessed May 2004.

28. Charles Cogan, interview with the author, May 2004.

29. Retired CIA official, interview with the author, May 2004.

30. David Long, interview with the author, April 2004.

31. Retired CIA officer, interview, May 2004.

32. William Sullivan, Mission to Iran (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981),
p. 142.

33. William Sullivan, “Straws in the Wind: Intellectual and Religious Opposi¬
tion in Iran,” Confidential dispatch from Teheran to Washington, July 25, 1977.

34. Sullivan, Mission to Iran p. 92.

35. John Waller, interview with the author, February 2004.

36. Memorandum of Conversation, “The Iranian National Liberation
Front,” May 8,1978, Secret. From the National Security Archives.

37. Memorandum of Conversation, “Further Discussions with the Libera¬
tion Movement of Iran (LMI) officials,” May 30, 1978, Secret. From the
National Security Archives.

38. Letter from Charles Naas to Flenry Precht, June 6, 1978, Secret. From
the National Security Archives.

39. Precht, interview. See also Precht’s oral history in the Middle East Jour¬
nal 58 (Winter 2004).

40. Walter Cutler, interview with the author, May 2004.

41. Ibid.

42. Bruce Laingen, interview with the author, June 2004.

43. Thomas Ahern, interview with the author, June 2004.

44. John Limbert, interview with the author, May 2004.

4 5. Laingen, interview.

46. Ahern, interview.

47. Retired CIA official, interview with the author, July 2004.

48. Laingen, interview.

49. Retired CIA official, interview, July 2004.

50. Precht, interview.

51. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle (New York: Farrar Straus &
Giroux, 1983), pp. 446-47.

52. Richard Cottam, “U.S. and Soviet Responses,” in Neither East nor
West, ed. Nikkie R. Keddie and Mark Gasiorowski (New Haven: Yale Univer¬
sity Press, 1990), pp. 276-78.

53. Vladimir Kuzichkin, Inside the KGB: My Life in Soviet Espionage (New
York: Ivy Books, 1990), p. 293.

54. Hamilton Jordan, Crisis: The Last Year of the Carter Presidency (New
York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1982), pp. 35, 51.

Notes • 36

10: Jihad I: The “Arc of Islam”

1. James E. Akins, interview with the author, November 2.002.

2. Former CIA official, interview with the author, May 2004.

3. James Critchlow, interview with Kathleen Klenetsky, July 2004.

4. Charles W. Hostler, “The Turks and Soviet Central Asia,” Middle East
Journal (1958), pp. 268-69.

5. Gene Sosin, Sparks of Liberty: An Insider’s Memoir of Radio Liberty
(University Park: Pennsylvania University State Press, 1999), p. 115.

6. Robert Gates, From the Shadows (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996),
P- 93-

7. In 1961, Bennigsen wrote The Evolution of Muslim Nationalities in the
USSR; in 1967, Islam in the Soviet Union; and in 1983, together with his daugh¬
ter, Marie Broxup, associate editor of Central Asian Survey, the classic The
Islamic Threat to the Soviet State.

8. Alexandre Bennigsen and Marie Broxup, The Islamic Threat to the
Soviet State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), p. 64.

9. Ibid., p. 48.

10. Ibid., p. 73.

11. Ibid., p. 77.

12. Ibid., p. 150.

13. Jeremy Azrael, interview with Kathleen Klenetsky, August 2004.

14. Zalmay Khalilzad, “The Return of the Great Game” (California Semi¬
nar on International Security and Foreign Policy, Discussion Paper No. 88,
1980), p. 41.

15. Ibid., pp. 70-71.

16. In 1983, Henze wrote a book. The Plot to Kill the Pope, promoting his
theory.

17. Paul B. Henze, “The Shamil Problem,” in The Middle East in Transition,
ed. Walter Z. Laqueur (New York: Praeger, 1958), p. 442.

18. Richard Pipes, “Muslims of Soviet Central Asia: Trends and Prospects,”
Part II, Middle East Journal (Summer 1955), p. 308.

19. Richard Pipes, Survival Is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America’s
Future (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 185.

20. Fawaz Gerges, America and Political Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), p. 68.

21. Retired CIA official, interview with the author, May 2004.

22. Rose Bannigan, interview with the author, July 2004.

23. Olivier Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan (Cambridge: Cam¬
bridge University Press, 1985), pp. 69-70.

24. Ibid., p. 71.

25. U.S. State Department, “Afghanistan’s Clerical Unrest: A Tentative
Assessment,” confidential, declassified, June 24,1970.

26. Ibid., p. 73.

362 • Notes

zj. U.S. embassy in Kabul, “Portrait of a Moslem Youth Extremist,” confi¬
dential, declassified, May 29,1972.

28. Robert Wirsing, Pakistan’s Security under Zia, 1977-1988 (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1991), p. 73, n. 2 6.

29. Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison, Out of Afghanistan (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 15.

30. Ibid., p. 16.

31. U.S. State Department, “Year End Afghan Internal Assessment,” confi¬
dential telegram, from U.S. embassy in Kabul, December 1975.

32. Ibid., p. 23.

33. U.S. State Department, “CENTO Council of Deputies Meeting,”
telegram to Middle East embassies, secret, declassified, June 1978.

34. Bruce Amstutz, U.S. State Department confidential analysis, April 11,
1979.

35. U.S. State Department, “Current Status of the Insurrection in Afghani¬
stan,” telegram, June 1979.

36. Quotes from Brzezinski from Le Nouvel Observateur, January 15-21,
1998.

37. Gates, p. 132.

38. Ibid., p. 144.

39. Ibid.

40. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), p. 63.

41. Shireen T. Hunter, The Future of Islam and the West (Westport, Conn.:
Praeger, 1988), p. 159.

42. George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press,
2003), p. 222.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid., p. 212.

45. Cordovez and Harrison, p. 162.

4 6. Former CIA official, interview with the author, March 2004.

47. Coll, pp. 120-21.

48. Dilip Hiro, Holy Wars (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 259.

49. Coll, p. 119.

11: Jihad II: Into Central Asia

1. Harold Saunders, interview with the author, March 2004.

2. Saunders, interview.

3. Retired CIA official, interview with the author, March 2004.

4. Martha Kessler, interview with the author, April 2004.

5. Robert Baer, interview with the author, March 2004.

6. Former CIA official, interview with the author, March 2004.

7. John Cooley, Unholy Wars (London: Pluto Press, 1999b PP- 3 I- 3 2 -

8. Ibid., p. 32.

9. Retired CIA official, interview with the author, June 2004.

10. Cooley, p. 32.

Notes • 363

xi. George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press,
2003), pp. 197, 2.01.

12. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (New York: The Penguin Press, 2.004), P- I2 - 9 -

13. Ibid., p. 132.

14. Ibid., p. 129.

15. Ibid., p. 132.

1 6. Ibid., p. 136.

17. Ibid., p. 134.

18. Cooley, pp. 88-89.

19. Coll, pp. 102,151.

20. Charles Freeman, interview with the author, April 2004.

21. Some analysts argued that the Soviet Union was already looking
for a way out of Afghanistan and planning its withdrawal, under Mikhail
Gorbachev, when the Stingers were introduced, and that the missiles themselves
had only a marginal impact. The supply of the Stingers did, however, create a
big problem for the CIA after the war ended, and the agency scrambled to buy
back excess Stingers rather than let them fall into the hands of terrorists around
the world.

22. Cooley, p. 85.

23. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in
Central Asia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 130.

24. Ibid., p. 87.

25. This story of Azzam is drawn from Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of
Political Islam (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 2002), pp. 144-47.

2 6. Ibid., p. 147.

27. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s,
2002), p. 41.

28. Coll, pp. 135-36.

29. Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin, Afghanistan: The Bear Trap
(Havertown, Penn.: Casemate, 1992), p. 106.

30. Kepel, p. 142.

31. Selig Harrison, interview with the author, June 2004.

32. Herbert Meyer, interview with the author, October 2004.

33. Ibid.

34. Coll, p. 97.

35. Ibid., p. 98.

36. Richard Krueger, interview with the author, March 2004.

37. Fawaz Gerges, America and Political Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), p. 71.

38. Crile, pp. 340-41.

39. Former CIA official, interview with the author, March 2004. Fahd, of
course, a notorious playboy, may have had his own cynical interpretation of his
role as “keeper of the faith.”

40. Meyer, interview.

41. Former CIA official, interview with the author, June 2004.

42. Yousaf and Adkin, p. 47.

3 64 • Notes

43. Former CIA official, interview with the author, July Z004.

44. Yousaf and Adkin, pp. 189-90.

45. Ibid., p. 193.

46. Ibid., p. 195.

47. Ibid., p. zoo.

48. Ibid., p. 195.

49. Ibid., p. 164.

50. Daniel Pipes, interview with the author, April Z004.

51. Cited in Omaha World Herald, September 16, zooi, p. izA.

5Z. Coll, pp. 168-69.

53. Walter Cutler, interview with the author. May Z004.

54. Freeman, interview.

55. Yousaf and Adkin, pp. Z08-9.

56. Cheryl Benard, interview with the author, July Z004.

57. Gary Sick, October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Elec¬
tion of Ronald Reagan (New York: Times Books, 1991), p. zz6.

58. Ibid., p. 59.

59. Ibid., pp. 69-71.

60. Additional, exhaustive tracking of the evidence for a Republican initia¬
tive toward Iran during the hostage crisis was compiled by journalist Robert
Parry, in Trick of Treason: The October Surprise Mystery (New York: Sheridan
Square Press, 1993).

61. Ibid., p. 115.

6z. Ibid., p. 14Z.

63. Ibid., p. 167.

64. Ibid., p. 19Z.

65. Interview with Patrick Lang, March 2004.

66. Sick, p. 200.

67. Vladimir Kuzichkin, Inside the KGB (New York: Ivy Books, 1990), pp.
104-5.

68. Ibid., pp. zoo-zoi.

69. James Bill, The Eagle and the Lion (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1988), p. Z73.

70. Mel Goodman, interview with the author, March Z004.

71. Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Answer to History (New York: Stein and
Day, 1980), p. IZ5.

7Z. Ashraf Pahlavi, Faces in a Mirror: Memoirs from Exile (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980), pp. 195-96.

73. See especially Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the
Iran-Contra Affair, November 1987; The Tower Commission Report by the
President’s Special Review Board, John Tower, chairman (New York: Times
Books, 1987); Firewall by Lawrence E. Walsh, the independent counsel in the
Iran-contra investigation (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

74. Tower Commission Report, p. zi.

Notes • 365

75. Howard Teicher and Gayle Radley Teicher, Twin Pillars to Desert Storm
(New York: William Morrow and Co., 1993), pp. 102-3.

76. Former CIA official, interview with the author, July 2004.

77. Tower Commission Report, pp. 112-13.

78. Ibid., p. 114.

79. Ibid., p. 115.

80. Teicher and Teicher, pp. 331-32.

81. Tower Commission Report, p. 119.

82. Teicher and Teicher, p. 332.

12; Clash of Civilizations?

1. Chris Hedges, “Muslim Militants Share Afghan Link,” New York
Times, March 28,1993, p. 14.

2. For a blow-by-blow account of the complicated civil war in Algeria,
1992 to 1999, see chapter 11, “The Logic of Massacre in the Second Algerian
War,” in Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 254-75.

3. Kepel, p. 165.

4. Ibid., p. 170.

5. Ibid., p. 174.

6 . Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, The Battle Looms: Islam and
Politics in the Middle East 1993, pp. 2, 6 ; cited in Fawaz Gerges, America and
Political Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 75.

7. “Interview with James A. Baker III,” Middle East Quarterly (September
1994), P- 83-

8. Robert Pelletreau, interview with the author, April 2004.

9. David Mack, interview with the author, April 2004.

10. Richard Schifter, interview with the author, May 2004.

11. Mack, interview.

12. Edward Djerejian, “The United States and the Middle East in a Chang¬
ing World” (address at Meridian House International, U.S. Department of State,
June 2, 1992).

13. Gerges, pp. 80-81.

14. Ibid., p. 155.

15. Pelletreau, interview.

16. Graham Fuller, Algeria: The Next Fundamentalist State? (Santa Monica:
RAND Corporation, 1996), p. xx.

17. Ibid., p. xiv.

18. Ibid., p. 4.

19. Ibid., p. xv.

20. Judith Miller, “The Islamic Wave,” New York Times Magazine, May 31,
1992., p. 23.

21. Gerges, p. 171.

366 ■ Notes

2.2.. James Woolsey, interview with the author. May 2004.

23. Edward W. Walker, interview with the author, February 2004.

24. Ibid.

25. Abdel Moneim Said, interview with the author, June 2004.

26. Pelletreau, interview.

27. Ibid.

28. Walker, interview.

29. Ibid.

30. Gerges, pp. 174-75*

31. Ibid., p. 175.

32. Ibid., p. 178.

33. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in
Central Asia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 176-77.

34. Ibid., p. 177.

35. Graham Fuller, The Future of Political Islam (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003), p. 115.

36. Sheila Heslin, testimony at Senate hearings into illegal fund-raising
activities, September 17,1997; cited in Rashid, p. 174.

37. Cited in Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, Forbidden Truth
(New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002), p. 21.

38. Rashid, p. 179.

39. Michael J. Berens, “University Helped U.S. Reach Out to Taliban,” Chi¬
cago Tribune, October 21, 2001.

40. Stephen Buttry and Jake Thompson, “UNO’s Connection to Taliban
Centers on Education,” Omaha World Herald, September 16, 2001.

41. Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway, “From U.S., the ABC’s of Jihad,”
Washington Post, March 23, 2002, p. Ai.

42. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1996), p. 218.

43. Ibid., p. 115.

44. Ibid., p. 211.

45. Ibid., p. 207.

46. Ibid., p. 258.

47. Ibid., p. 263.

48. Ibid., p. 215.

49. Ibid., p. 210.

50. Bernard Lewis, “The Middle Eastern Reaction to Soviet Pressures,”
Middle East Journal 10 (Spring 1956), pp. 130—31.

51. Bernard Lewis, The Middle East and the West (New York: Harper &
Row, 1964), p. 135.

52. Ibid., p. 133.

53. Ibid., p. 140.

54. Peter Waldman, “A Historian’s Take on Islam Steers U.S. in Terrorism
Fight,” Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2004, p. 1.

55. Ibid.

Notes • 367

56. Patrick Lang, interview with the author, March 2004.

57. Woolsey, interview.

58. Lang, interview.

59. For a detailed account of the founding and role of the OSP, see Robert
Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, “The Lie Factory,” Mother Jones, January-February
2004, p. 34.

60. Waldman, Wall Street Journal.

6 1. Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol, The War over Iraq (San Fran¬
cisco: Encounter Books, 2003), p. 124 and pp. vii-viii.

62. Benador Associates, press conference, Washington, D.C., February 13,
2003.

63. The full text of the memo is at http:www.israeleconomy.org/stratl.htm.

64. Bernard Lewis, “Rethinking the Middle East,” Foreign Affairs (Fall
1992), pp. 99ff.

65. Charles Freeman, interview with the author, May 2003.

66. David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on
Terror (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 140-41.

67. Max Singer, interview with the author, February 2003.

68. Michael Ledeen, The War against the Terror Masters (New York: Tru¬
man Talley Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2002), pp. 208-9. 1° the book, Ledeen
thanks Bernard Lewis for “personal guidance,” and adds: “Harold Rhode, at
the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessments, has been my guru on the Middle East
for nearly twenty years. His boss, Andy Marshall, has been a constant source of
good ideas,” p. 240.

69. James E. Atkins, interview with author, January 2003.

70. Anonymous, Imperial Hubris (Washington: Brassey’s, 2004), p. xv.

71. Reuel Marc Gerecht, The Islamic Paradox: Shiite Clerics, Sunni Funda¬
mentalists, and the Coming of Arab Democracy (Washington, D.C.: The AEI
Press, 2004), p. 10.

72. Ibid., p. 18.

73. Ibid., p. 41.

74. Ibid., p. 50.

75. Ibid., p. 53.

Acknowledgments

Many, many people helped me find my way through what often
seem to be the trackless wastelands of Middle East politics, as well as
the shifting sands of U.S. policy toward that battle-scarred region. If
I’ve gotten lost, it is my own fault. But I’ve had navigational guidance
from experienced foreign service officers, intelligence officers, military
men, and Middle East experts of all kinds. Some of them can’t be
named, because they’ve requested anonymity. But many others can be
cited by name.

Among the very most helpful: Thomas Ahern, James Akins, Robert
Baer, Amatzia Baram, Cheryl Benard, Vincent Cannistraro, Raymond
Close, Charles Cogan, Walter Cutler, Michael Dunn, Hermann Eilts,
Melvin Goodman, Joel Gordon, Charles Freeman, Selig Harrison,
Fereydoun Hoveyda, Martha Kessler, Dick Krueger, Bruce Laingen,
Patrick Lang, John Limbert, David Long, David Mack, Charles Naas,
Yitzhak Nakash, Robert Pelletreau, Henry Precht, Abdel Moneim
Said, Harold Saunders, Richard Schifter, Talcott Seelye, Peter Singer,
John Voll, Edward Walker, John Waller, Charles Waterman, Philip
Wilcox, James Woolsey, and Judith Yaphe.

Some people need to be singled out for special mention. First of all,
I want to thank Ruth Van Laningham and the staff of the library at

370 • Acknowledgments

the Middle East Institute, who provided patient assistance and usually
looked the other way on late fees for overdue books. I want to thank
Sylvain Besson of Le Temps (Geneva) for his help on Said Ramadan
and the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe. And Juan Cole, the Univer¬
sity of Michagan historian, continually provided important insights.

I had research help from several people, whose work I value highly
and to whom I am eternally grateful. Valentina Marano conducted
interviews and provided deft, and quick, research in a wide range of
areas and was a pleasure to work with. Kathleen Klenetsky provided
a steady stream of information, wonderful insights, and important
interviews on U.S. misadventures in Central Asia. And Laura Rozen
helped to gather important research materials and sort out the mys¬
teries of the Iran-contra episode. Of course, I emphasize that my con¬
clusions, right or wrong, are mine alone.

This book would never have been written except for Steve Fraser
and Tom Englehardt, the originators of the American Empire Project.
I don’t have an agent and hadn’t intended to write a book until I got a
probing phone call from Steve sometime in the spring of 2003. Steve
shepherded the book from germ of an idea to proposal to manuscript,
and he provided invaluable advice about how to organize the mate¬
rial—which, for someone used to writing magazine-length pieces, was
far trickier than I had suspected. Sara Bershtel, the associate publisher
at Metropolitan Books, for some reason believed that I could produce
my first book, and she and her assistant, Kate Levin, were a joy to
work with.

Most of all, of course, I have to thank Barbara Dreyfuss, who put
up with my anxieties and long hours shut in my office and who read
my chapters as they emerged. She also served as an unofficial research
assistant, especially in regard to the complex machinations of the
world of Islamic banking. And to my two children, to whom the book
is dedicated, and who must have wondered from time to time where
their father was, You performed the most important service of all: you
kept me smiling.

Index

Abdel Aziz, King, 62
Abdel-Shafi, Dr. Haider, I97
Abduh, Mohammed, 20-21, 22, 34, 46, 49,
5 1

as Afghani’s chief disciple, 20-21, 22,
26-30, 33
described, 26
as mufti of Egypt, 31
pan-Islamic message, 29-30
Abdullah, king of Transjordan, 40, 75, 76,
193

Abdul Wahhab, Mohammad ibn, 36-37

Abrams, Elliott, 336

Aburish, Said, 65

Acheson, Dean, 87

Adams, C. C., 28, 50

Adham, Kamal, 147-48,150-52,156

Adventures in the Middle East (Wilber),

123

Afghani, Jamal Eddine, aT, 20-34, 46, 49,
51, 146

creation of pan-Islamic movement, 12,
19-34,46
death of, 26, 34
described, 21-22, 27
as Freemason, 24, 26, 28, 32
outline of public life, 25-26
religious beliefs, 22-23, 2 4, 31-31
Afghanistan, 95, 126, 144
British influence in, 35
CIA support for Islamists prior to 1979,
257-64

Daoud regime in, 260-63
holy war in, 245-47, 254, 267-90
activities across the Amu River, 284-87
Afghan jihadis, see Afghan jihadis
aftermath of, 287-91, 302
expansion of, 277
Herat revolt of 1979,164, 265
implications for Islamists, 245-46, 312
phases of, 277

Soviet withdrawal, 287, 289, 302
true beginnings of, 264, 265
the Northern Alliance, 326
Soviet invasion of, 247, 254, 256, 264,
265-66

Soviet-leaning Taraki regime in, 250, 163,
266

Taliban in, see Taliban
“the professors” in, 258, 259-60, 280
2001 war in, 13, 14, 246, 249, 304, 307,
326,329

withdrawal of U.S. forces from, 15,

307

Afghanistan: The Bear Trap (Yousaf), 280
Afghan jihadis, 3, 12, 19, 132, r62, 259,
267-90

Arab Afghans, 268, 274-81
Egypt and, 148, 273, 274-75, 282
Israel and, 206, 246, 298
Pakistan and, 256, 263, 265, 266, 267,
z 7 2 > 2 73> 2 74 j 2-82
control over distribution of aid, 266,
280

372 - ' Index

Afghan jihadis ( cont’d)

incursions into Soviet Central Asia and,
285-87

Saudi Arabia and, 256, 265, 266, 267,
268, 273, 277, 280, 282, 284, 290
second front against moderate Afghanis,
291

suicide attacks and, 276

training of, 245, 274, 275, 276, 277, 290,

31 1

U.S. support for, 4, 132, 148, 165, 167,
189, 21 j, 218, 245, 246, 256, 271,
2-73. z 74, i 77i 178, 2.80
start of direct aid, 264, 265
Afraq, Saad, 105-6
Ahern, Thomas, 222, 239
Ahmad, Imam, 140
Ahmad, Mohammed (the Mahdi), 29
Ahram, At, 151

Akins, James, 122,129, 248, 338
A1 Aqsa mosque, Jerusalem, 144, 156
Alawites of Syria, 199, 200, 202
A1 Azhar mosque, Cairo, 25, 26, 27, 31, 50,
78, 128, 154, 180, 199.2-58, 279
A1 Baraka banking empire, 177,180
Al-Baraka Investment and Development
Company, 180-81
A1 Gamaa, 321
Algar, Hamid, 37, 38
Algeria, 3, 144, 246, 306, 313-15, 316,
318-19,325,329,331
army suppression of Islamists in, 5, 313,
315,316, 318

civil war in, 79, 302, 311,312, 313-15,
318,321

buildup of Islamist influence prior to,
3*4

free-market economics in, 173
independence, 96

Algeria: The Next Fundamentalist State?
(Fuller), 318-19

Algerian Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), 173,
306,313,314-15,318-19
A1 Kifah Afghan Refuge Center, Brooklyn,
278

A1 Qaeda, 5, 95, 161, 188, 256, 304-5, 309,
311,328,329,330,339
Afghan holy war and foundations of, 246,
274, 276, 279, 287, 288, 302
investigation of, 166

Iraq and, 13-14, 306, 308, 334, 335, 339
Islamic Liberation Party and, 75
post-9/11 attacks, 305
September nth, see September nth, 2001
threat of, perspective on, 13, 304
AlTaqwa (bank), 136, 166
America and Political Islam (Gerges),

256

American Enterprise Institute, 307, 336, 337,
340

American Jewish Committee, 248

American Journal of Islamic Finance, 178

American University of Beirut, 7, 92

Amery, Julian, 106

Ames, Robert, 239, 283

Amin, Mustapha, 137

Amini, Ali, 225

Amnesty International, 205

Anas, Abdallah, 314

Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later British
Petroleum), 109, m
Central Information Bureau, 114
Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), 109
Arab Bureau, 30, 40-41, 62, 185
Arabi, Ahmad, 27

Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco),
67, 69, 76, 89, 142
Arabists, 11, 65, 127,134, 299
in Israeli security services, 206
Nasser and, 97,107
Palestinian Islamists and, 208-9
Arabists: Romance of an American Elite, The
(Kaplan), ti

Arab Masonic Society, 33
Arab nationalism, 2, 4, 79-80, 142

Islamist opposition to, 27-28, 49, 59, 73,

76, 2.56,331

1967 Arab-Israeli war and, 144, 156
see also individual groups, countries, and
leaders

Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), 185
Arab News Agency, 62
Arab socialism, 3, 133,146,156, 177
Arafat, Yasser, 193, 209, 211, 306
Arai, Fakhr, 112-13
“arc of Islam” thesis, 240-41, 244-45,
244-69, 288

Benningsen and, 252-54, 255, 257, 263,
281, 287

Brzezinski and, 240-41, 245, 249, 250,
251, 253, 255, 256, 257, 263, 281,
287, 326

William Casey and, 268, 281, 282,

284-87, 316
history of, 249-54
holy war in Afghanistan and, see
Afghanistan, holy war in
Armed Islamic Group (GIA), Algeria, 314
Ashcroft, John, 305
Asia Foundation, 257, 258, 260
Assad, Bashir, 306
Assad, Hafez, 145,199-205
Assad, Rifaat, 205
Associated Press, 117
Aswan Dam, 106

Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal, 44, 92, 110, 329

Index

373

Avrakotos, Gus, 175-76, 284
Azerbaijan, 9
Aziz, Shaukut, 173'

Azm, Yusaf, al-, 193

Azrael, Jeremy, 253-54

Azzam, Abdullah, 178-80, 281, 314, 315

Baath Party, 73, 185, 193, 194, 199
in Iraq, 145, 176, 177. 3°6, 339
in Syria, 199, 202, 205, 306
Babar, Nasirullah, 260-61
Badr, Mohammed, al-, 140
Badr Brigade, 340
Baer, Robert, 102, 204-5
Baghdad Pact, 10, 71
Baha, Abdul, 33
Baha’is, 32-33
Bahrain, 96, 98, 173, 340
Bahrain Islamic Bank, 180
Bakay, Mohammed, el, 78
Baker, James, 315, 316
Balfour, Arthur Lord, 40
Bangladesh, 339
Bani-Sadr, Abolhassan, 23, 217
Bankers Trust, 171, 172
Bank of Credit and Commerce International
(BCCI), 167

Banna, Abdel-Rahman, al-, 59
Banna, Hassan, al-, 20, 62-63, 65-66, 73,
75, 81, 146, 193,199
assassination of, 63
background of, 51
importance of, 50-51
Muslim Brotherhood and, 47, 51-54,
55-57,62, 63,66, 127
founding of, 12, 20, 52
political program, 51-52
Banna, Jamal, al-, 178
Banna, Wafa, al-, 72
Bannigan, John and Rose, 257
Banque Nationale de Paris, 172
Baqir, Mirza Mohammed, 32, 33
Barak, Ehud, 209, 210, 211
Baraka Investment and Development
Company, AI-, 180-81
Baring, Evelyn, see Cromer, Lord, Evelyn
Baring

Bass, Warren, 139

bazaar (wealthy merchant families), 162,
187, 225, 294

Bazargan, Mehdi, 13, 227-28,134
“official” Iranian government headed by,
*3 8 , *39, 2-4°, 241, 264
Begin, Menachem, 158, 196, 206
Behbehani, Ayatollah, 117, 235
Beheshti, Mohammed Hosseini, 225, 239,
240

Bell, Gertrude, 6, 41, 42

Benard, Cheryl, 291

Bennigsen, Alexandre, 251-54, 255, 256,
257, 263, 281, 287
Besson, Sylvain, 79
Bhutto, Benazir, 260

Bhutto, Zulfiqar Ali, 143, 260, 262, 266,
281

Bill, James, 220, 225, 226, 296
bin Baz, Sheikh Abel Aziz, 128
bin Laden, Sheikh Mohammed, 125
bin Laden, Osama, 3, 5, 20, 95, 161,
190-91, 302

Abdullah Azzam and, 278, 279-80
Afghan jihad and, 266, 268, 274, 279-80,
281

Al Qaeda and, see Al Qaeda
Services Bureau and, 278, 279, 314
Taliban and, 328

U.S. task forces aimed at finding, 329-30
bin Laden family, rise of, 125
Birzeit University, 207
Black September 1970,145, 146, 185,

*79

Bliss, Daniel and Howard, 7
Blunt, Wilfred Scawen, 42
Bolton, John, 336
Borujerdi, Ayatollah, 118, 119
“Boscoes” (Iranian brothers), 116
Bosnia, 38

Boulby, Marion, 75-76, 193
Bourguiba, Habib, 91
Bowling, John, 224
Boyle, David “Archie,” 55
Brahimi, Maloud, 319
Britain, see Great Britain
British Petroleum, 109
Brookings Institution, 166, 325
Browne, Edward Granville, 20, 32-33, 34,
39.4*

Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 218, 223, 233, 236,
268, 274, 277

“arc of Islam” thesis and, 240-41, 245,
249, 250, 251, 253, 256, 257, 263,
281, 287, 326
background of, 251
Bennigsen and, 252

start of direct U.S. aid to Afghan jihadis
and, 264, 265
Buensch, Franz, 105-6
Bunker, Ellsworth, 140
Bush, George H. W., and Bush

administration, 315-18, 319
Bush, George W., and Bush administration,
5,3H

Arafat and, 211
axis-of-evil, 309, 310
democratic reform in the Middle East and,
15-16, 307-9, 336-37

374 * Index

Bush, George W., and Bush administration
(cont’d)

empire building and, 14, 304-5, 307, 330,
335

Iraq war and, see Iraq, 1003 war in
Islamic right, alliances with, 5, 306, 310,
34°i 34i

preemptive war and, 14, 304
war on terrorism, see war on terrorism
Business Week, 248

Caffery, Jefferson, 77-79, 100
Cairo University, 154
Call, The, 152, 163
Cambridge University, 39
Campbell, John C., 84-85
Camp David agreements, 148, 149
capitalism, Islamists and, 163, 168-69,
173-75

Carter, Jimmy, and Carter administration,
271,285

Afghan jihadis, start of direct aid to, 264,
265

analysis of political Islam, 271-72
“arc of Islam” thesis and, see “arc of
Islam” thesis

Brzezinski’s foreign policy and, see
Brzezinski, Zbigniew

Iran and, 215-17, 220, 221, 223, 224-28,
229-30, 240-42, 292, 293
Nationalities Working Group (NWG),

150>i5i-5i> 2.54-55
Carter Doctrine, 70, 247, 249
Casey, William (Bill), 4, 175, 218, 268,
281-85

Afghan holy war and, 267, 276, 281, 282
“arc of Islam” and, 268, 281, 282,

284-87, 326
death of, 288

Iran-contra scandal and, 293, 298,
299-300,318

Iranian clergy and, 217, 293-94
“October Surprise” and, 292, 293
religion and Cold War policies of, 282-83
Cave, George, 239
Cecil, Robert, 40

Center for Afghanistan Studies, University of
Nebraska, 328

Central Asia, “arc of Islam” and, see “arc of
Islam” thesis

Central Command (Centcom), 249
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 86-88,
105,138, 199, 306, 329
Afghan Islamic right prior to 1979 and,
257-64

Afghan jihadis and, 132,165,167, 265,
268, 274, 275, 276, 280, 281, 290
ISI’s control over distribution of aid, 266

Algeria and, 315
A1 Qaeda and, 311
Arabists within, 11

“arc of Islam” thesis and, 250, 253-54
Bazargan government in Iran and, 239-40,
264

BCCI and, 167
bin Laden and, 329-30
Egyptian Free Officers and, 97, 98
Iran contra scandal and, 4, 175
Iranian coup of 1953 and, 3, 94, 109-17,
224

Iranian revolution of 1979 and, 214, 216,
218, 220, 221-22, 228-34, 239, 272
Iran-Iraq war and, 239
Israel’s support for Islamic right and, 191,
198

Jordan’s support for Islamic right and,

191

Khomeini’s intelligence service and,

295-96

knowledge of Islam and Islamism, 230,
133-34,171-73,190-91
William Casey and, 282-83
failure to recognize it as worldwide
movement, 218, 272, 283
in 1950s, io-ii, 66-67
in 1970s in Egypt, 160-61
Mubarak government and, 3 20
Muslim Brotherhood and, 48, 102, 108,
150, 204-5

Muslim World League and, 133-34
Nasser and, 94, 95,102, 107, 108, 139
1973 Ramadan War and, 156
Ramadan and, 77, 79
Sadat and, 148
Syria and, 124

Taliban-endorsed textbooks and, 328, 329
Yemen war and, 141

Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), 10,

Chalabi, Ahmed, 334, 335
Cham ran, Mustafa, 241
Chase Manhattan, 171,172, 223
Chechnya, 254, 268, 273, 287
Cheney, Richard, 335
China, 326

Afghan holy war and, 246, 277
Christian Coalition, 11
Christianity, 83, 88
Christian right, 11-13, 310
Christison, Kathy, 160
Christopher, Warren, 322
Churchill, Winston, 6, 40, 41, 69, 101, 109,
185,287-88

Citibank, 168,171, 172,173,178
Citi Islamic Bank, 173
Citino, Nathan, 122-23,124

Index

375

“clash of civilizations,” 5, 13,14, 81, 271,
303-4, 310-11, 316, 317, 330-35
Clash of Civilizations, The (Huntington),
331

“Clean Break: A Strategy for Security the
Realm, A,” 336

Clinton, Bill, and Clinton administration,
311 , 3*5

Algeria policy, 318, 325
Oslo peace process and, 211
Close, Ray, 127, 131,134,152
CNN, 330

Coalition of Islamic Societies, 225
Cogan, Charles, 226-27, 232
Cohen, Stephen P., 235, 288
Cold War:
end of, 4, 303, 331
U.S. policy toward Islamism and,
311-12

start of, 9-10, 63

with us-or-against-us view of, 96,108,
125,133,205

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